Calling Me Home: A Novel

by Julie Kibler

  “The neighbors had no idea I’d been pregnant until they saw me pushing Dane down the sidewalk in a pram to the drugstore or library or wherever I needed to go. I was the crazy neighbor lady after that. I never made close friends there.”

  “Were you happy Dane was white? That he didn’t look anything like Robert?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “It was easier on everyone. I never had to confess my betrayal to Max. Dane never had to suffer what a child of Robert’s would have back then. People have changed some, but even these days, I suspect it would be hard at times, especially with both parents being white.”

  I nodded.

  “But honestly, Dorrie, I was devastated. Once again, I didn’t have that little piece of Robert to remember him by. The letter came a week before Dane was born. After I read it, I decided I didn’t have the strength to give birth. I wasn’t sure I cared whether either of us survived. But Max—he was a good man—he pulled me along, never questioning why I was so numb and dead inside. He walked me up and down the halls of that house, bathed my forehead with cool cloths, called the doctor to come when it was time. He took Dane in his arms the minute he was born, loving him immediately, as I knew he would, then placed him at my breast and forced me to love him, too. I alternated between anger and fear those first weeks—anger that I would never see Robert again and had no child to remember him by, and fear that I’d be a bad mother, that I’d be unable or unwilling to care for Dane like I should. When Max saw how it was, he never asked me to do it again. Once was enough, for both of us.”

  She reached back into her purse for something so tiny, I didn’t recognize it until she balanced it on my palm. “Of course, I did have something to remember Robert by. Still do.”

  It was that tiny thimble I’d seen on her dresser when I did her hair. The make-do symbol the preacher’s wife gave them on their wedding day.

  “Max found it in our mailbox the day after Robert left. I don’t know when Robert put it there. Maybe that same day. I didn’t watch him go. I couldn’t, or I’d have run after him, begging all the way down the street for him not to leave, to take me with him forever.”

  I turned the thimble on my thumb. The three words told their whole story.

  Faith. Hope. Love.

  But who lay waiting in the funeral home? All the way from Texas to Cincinnati, I’d assumed it was Robert, but he’d been here in this old grave the whole time. Someone else waited for Miss Isabelle’s good-bye.

  Nell? As Miss Isabelle took her slow, short steps back to the car, I imagined her saying good-bye to the woman who’d been a sister to her, willing to do almost anything for her—even if it meant swallowing her own fear.

  “What about the marker at that college?” I said to Miss Isabelle once we were settled back in the Buick. “I thought it meant Robert finished medical school.”

  “Robert completed a semester of basic medical training at Murray right before he shipped out the last time. His training and service would have counted toward his degree, and he would have completed his studies soon after the war. He wasn’t the only member of his class who died overseas.”

  I’d assumed they were graduates. Now I understood the list had included all who would have finished in 1946. I wondered how many others hadn’t made it back alive that last year of war, when black men were finally allowed in the field.

  Our short return drive to the funeral home was quiet. When I switched off the ignition, Miss Isabelle took about the deepest breath I’d ever heard. I went around to her door and peeked in. She looked like she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up and out of the car.

  “You going to be okay, now?”

  “I made it this far, didn’t I?”

  “You sure did, Miss Isabelle. You sure did.”

  Farther than I ever dreamed when we set out.

  Inside, she studied easels set up outside each visitation room, labeled with the names of the deceased and their dates of birth and death. When she stopped, I didn’t recognize the first name. It was a woman’s name, but not any name Miss Isabelle had mentioned in her story. She had never called anyone Pearl.

  The last name? I knew it well by now.

  Who was Pearl Prewitt?

  Miss Isabelle had told me one last detail on the way over. She and Max and Dane had moved to Texas shortly after the war ended. How would she know someone who’d been a small child when they moved away? Why would it matter?

  Suddenly, I didn’t think I could follow her into the quiet room where a flower-laden casket waited, half-open, so the one who lay there could receive farewells from those who’d loved her. But I did. Now, more than ever, Miss Isabelle would need someone to lean on.

  39

  Miss Isabelle, Present Day

  I DRINK IN her portraits. They lean against easels. Portraits of Pearl as an infant, then as a toddler, then as a young woman and, later, a middle-aged one. Finally, a snapshot of her standing near a window. The still figure in the nearby casket favors that one. Perhaps the undertaker studied it, preparing her for burial.

  She was old. I was older, certainly, but each of her seventy-two birthdays haunted me. My skin is smooth for an old woman’s, and hers was slightly more so. She died suddenly, unexpectedly, unmarked by years of disease. In the recent photo, her eyes are bright, alert and she stands erect, lacking the hesitation I too often observe in women of a certain age. Yet, in her steady gaze, I also detect decades of sorrow.

  A tinge of color clearly identifies her as Robert’s daughter. The hint of him also surface in her height—by my estimation from the photos, surpassing mine by a good three or four inches—and in her intensity.

  But here is what shreds the breath from me, as certainly as a scalpel reaching between my ribs to scrape my lungs and heart: Pearl looked like me.

  40

  Dorrie, Present Day

  MISS ISABELLE GAZED at her daughter. The one torn from her all those years ago. The one she never had a chance to hold.

  When I realized who lay in the casket, I feared I might pass out. I grabbed the back of one of those overstuffed chairs arranged around the visitation room for guests. We’d arrived thirty minutes before the official start time. The room was quiet and empty except for me and Miss Isabelle, but now, another elderly woman slipped in behind us, pushing a walker along the carpet. I knew she was Nell—alive—not only by her resemblance to Pearl and how close she and Miss Isabelle looked in age but also by her eyes as she watched Miss Isabelle study her lost daughter.

  Miss Isabelle had brought me along because she knew I loved her like I would a mother—and because she knew I’d be strong when she couldn’t be.

  And that was now.

  I’d entered the room behind her, but I took a breath and moved close. She reached for the crook of my arm, and I pulled her hand into it and placed mine over hers.

  I tried to imagine what she was thinking and feeling. It was beyond my comprehension. How had her daughter survived, this Pearl Prewitt, who’d come too early out of Miss Isabelle’s body, too tiny and blue to make it, or so Miss Isabelle’s mother had said? Where had Pearl been all these years while Miss Isabelle kept her grief secreted away? When Miss Isabelle married for practicality instead of passion? While she mothered a son she loved, and grieved for the daughter she’d never even seen?

  Who had done this?

  I turned to look at Nell. I wanted to march right over, demand explanations for the selfishness of whoever had hidden Pearl—in plain view if my gut told me right. For denying Miss Isabelle all those decades of mothering and watching her baby grow into a beautiful woman. For all I knew, there were grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

  This was the cruelest part of the story so far.

  But when Miss Isabelle saw Nell, she hurried as fast as she could on her tired bird legs, and the two embraced. It was a picture of sisters, as different as they were, coming together in something so big, so profound, I couldn’t grasp it.

  Miss Isabelle’s eyes filled and over
flowed, and Nell’s did, too. Miss Isabelle’s whispered words cut me all the way inside. “Oh, Nell. She’s so beautiful. I’ve missed her my whole life.”

  Nell brought Miss Isabelle a photo album that had been placed near the casket. Miss Isabelle turned the pages slowly, studying each portrait or candid shot of Pearl. At one, she clutched her hand to her chest, then motioned for me to look. Like the slide she’d stolen and hidden, it was a family portrait. She named them, resting a finger against each face: Nell and Cora, Brother James and Alfred, and, of course, the infant Pearl on the laps of the women who had mothered her, their bodies so close, you couldn’t tell who really held her. Only Robert was missing. Had he known about Pearl? Did he know she was his?

  I had to look away.

  Miss Isabelle stayed quiet the rest of the evening, sitting, solitary, in a chair that dwarfed her, listening, watching those who came to pay their respects to her daughter and to the family. I had chosen a settee next to her chair. Some folks asked if the seat beside me was taken, then extended their hands, introducing themselves as friends or relatives of the deceased. I gave my first name, didn’t offer any relationship. Eventually, they’d move or turn to talk to someone else.

  Mostly, Miss Isabelle gazed at her daughter’s face, which was plainly visible from where she sat. She knew none of the visitors but Nell—Cora was long dead, of course. The small crowd sent curious looks toward the elderly white woman in the corner who resembled Pearl enough to puzzle them. But Nell didn’t introduce her; she allowed Miss Isabelle to mourn in peace, preventing awkward explanations.

  Except, near the end, Nell brought someone to her. She introduced him as Pearl’s son. Pearl had married late, though she eventually divorced and took back her maiden name. Her son was in his late thirties, a father, married. A small girl, no more than four or five, hung on to his coattails, peeking around to study Miss Isabelle with rainy-day eyes—so like hers and Pearl’s—until Miss Isabelle smiled at her. The child skipped around then and squeezed into the chair beside her. She picked up Miss Isabelle’s hand and stroked the skin on the back of it, then up her arm. “Your skin is soft,” she said, and I saw Miss Isabelle shiver. “Are you my great-granny? That’s what Mommy said. You’re pretty. My granny is pretty, too. She died.”

  Her father shifted awkwardly on his heels, allowing the child to communicate for him, while Pearl’s daughter-in-law watched with gleaming, happy-sad eyes. The tiny girl whispered to Miss Isabelle after her father moved away to other parts of the room to visit with family and friends. Eventually, she fell asleep in the chair, still stroking Miss Isabelle’s skin, sometimes her cheek, and when her parents were ready to depart, her daddy gently extracted her from the curve of Miss Isabelle’s embrace. Miss Isabelle tucked her elbow close against her hip, against the fading warmth left by the slumbering girl.

  We left as soon as the visitation hours ended, returning to the inn early, where Miss Isabelle was too tired even to consider a snack from the tray the innkeeper had left. She sipped hot water, then asked for help getting ready for bed. She could barely raise her arms as I unbuttoned and unzipped her from her pretty floral dress. It was the first time I’d ever seen her mostly unclothed. She was so small, so fragile-looking, I was afraid her bones might break if I didn’t move slowly, carefully, helping her push her arms into her nightgown and pulling it down to cover her again.

  “Thank you, Dorrie,” she said. “You’ll never know … I couldn’t have done this alone.”

  I answered with a gentle squeeze on her shoulders. “I know, Miss Isabelle. I know.”

  She seemed to sleep immediately, but I suspect she only rested her eyes in that big fluffy bed, imagining the life she’d missed, maybe only drifting before the hour came for us to rise and go to the church for Pearl’s funeral.

  The service was formal, quiet, though in the reading of Pearl’s obituary, the crowd stirred when the preacher named Cora Prewitt as foster mother and Isabelle McAllister Thomas as mother. We moved from church to cemetery, where Pearl’s coffin would be lowered into the ground next to Robert’s grave. All morning, Miss Isabelle was elegantly composed, right up until the preacher said his final words over Pearl. Then her arm quivered against mine, and I turned to see her face crumple up.

  I’d never seen anything but tears shining in her eyes at the visitation and in all the days we’d spent together. Now she quietly sobbed, and watching her body racked with such grief was painful. I folded her against me, as if I were the mother and she my little child.

  Later, we drove to Nell’s home. She was widowed, Brother James having passed years earlier. She still lived in the same little South Newport community where she’d grown up with Robert, in a long, skinny shotgun house she and Brother James had bought after they married. Miss Isabelle said the area hadn’t changed much, but the little church where she’d met Robert in the arbor was long gone, demolished to make way for an industrial building.

  Folks brought covered hot dishes into the house, plates filled with cold cuts, cookies, and pies. Some approached Miss Isabelle now, encouraged by Nell, cautiously, then confidently when she smiled, speaking of Pearl’s life, how generous she’d been. In spite of her unclear heritage, despite a difficult marriage, while parenting a son mostly on her own, she’d been caretaker of so many more. She’d been a teacher, first in a segregated Covington grade school, than later in an integrated school during the turbulent civil rights era. Other than Pearl’s beautiful little granddaughter, the few young people present were mostly children or grandchildren of students she’d mentored in a world that would continue to deny them full status in so many ways, even while the civil rights movement was a memory for most.

  I marveled at how graciously Miss Isabelle responded to the words of these strangers. Me? I might have been on the floor by then, kicking and screaming about my lost daughter and every minute I’d missed.

  Finally, the crowd thinned. Nell closed the door on the last visitors, who’d hugged her on their way out, rocking her through her own grief. She’d been one of Pearl’s surrogate mothers, too, though Pearl called her “Sister” all her life.

  Nell came to the kitchen table, where I’d settled Miss Isabelle with a plate of food. Miss Isabelle only nibbled. She had no appetite, and though she ate like a bird anyway, I worried she would grow weak. She seemed to be wasting away before my eyes. I encouraged her to drink some decaf coffee, hoping the milk she added would strengthen her.

  Nell poured herself a cup, too, and pulled her chair close. The three of us sat there quietly awhile. The scent of strong coffee and relief that the funeral was finished settled around us, mingling with the sorrow that had weighed us down since we’d walked into the funeral home the day before.

  After a few moments, Felicia, Pearl’s daughter-in-law, returned, having dropped her husband and little girl at home. She sat at Nell’s side while Nell explained everything that had happened. While compiling a list to make phone calls, Felicia had been the one to discover a name and number in Pearl’s address book—along with cryptic notes scribbled by Pearl. Felicia had questioned Nell about whether Isabelle Thomas was someone they should notify about her mother-in-law’s death.

  Nell had reluctantly told Felicia the story of Isabelle and Robert, and, ultimately, about Pearl’s birth. Like so many from her generation, Nell had thought it best to leave well enough alone, to let the past be the past, where it could do no more harm. But Felicia persisted and Nell agreed Felicia should make the call. She had told Miss Isabelle very little over the phone—nearly two weeks earlier, I learned. They’d postponed Pearl’s burial until Miss Isabelle could be there, to give her a chance to absorb the shock, then make the journey. Bless her, but I still could hardly stand thinking about Miss Isabelle receiving that call, about her dealing with her grief alone in those days before she asked me to bring her to this place. How had she done it? And how had she kept herself together while we traveled, kept her chin so high, even to the point of being able to laugh at times?
/>   Lord, have mercy. She was stronger than I’d ever imagined—even if she needed me, too.

  “After Sallie Ames, the midwife, delivered you of Pearl,” Nell said, “she knew the baby was likely too tiny to survive. Your mother made her promise she’d carry her away, take her to the colored orphans home in Cincinnati. Shalerville was no place for a tiny black baby, of course, even if she survived. Sallie felt so sorry for you, Isabelle. She hated taking the baby from you, not giving you a chance to see her or hold her, even if only for a minute.

  “But she found out where that baby belonged. Not at an orphanage, where after coming so early, she would surely die. Sallie came knocking at our door late that night. It was sweltering hot, deep of the summer—probably what kept Pearl alive those first few hours, along with her own little stubborn spirit. Sallie wasn’t alone by then.” Nell quieted, and Isabelle leaned toward her, desperate to learn who had accompanied Sallie. Nell seemed scared to continue. Waiting, my own breath hung in my chest.

  “It was your father, honey. Your father … he followed along behind Sallie, watching her safely out of Shalerville in the dark; then he called to her, and the two of them hurried to our house with the baby. Sallie had helped with early babies before, of course, but Doc McAllister, he knew some things because of his journals, knew what they’d been doing, keeping babies that came too soon in incubators. People could even go to fair exhibits and see the babies behind glass in the incubators. The admittance fees paid for their medical care. He instructed Momma to keep her warm and close to a human body every single minute, how to feed her, a drop at a time, with a special formula he made up. We all took turns with her—Momma, Daddy, and me. He came by often to check on Pearl, to bring more formula and weigh her and watch for signs of trouble. It was touch-and-go those first weeks, but that baby girl, she held on, fighting with everything she had in her little bitty body to survive. And survive she did.”