My Brother Louis Measures Worms

by Barbara Robinson

  They both were officers of the Women’s Missionary Society—Louisa May rolled bandages, made layettes for African babies, collected and mended everybody’s used clothing for the mission boxes and kept careful track of the organization’s funds; Alma was in charge of devotions every other month, which accounted for most of the pretty thoughts on the dish towels. However, despite this lopsided division of labor (or maybe because of it), they got along very well, agreeing on almost everything except Alma’s special concern: a great passion for searching out and recording the genealogy of the Fuller family, which was a matter of very little interest to everyone else, including Louisa May.

  After much correspondence, Alma would establish a family tie with somebody in Ponca City, Oklahoma, or East Orange, New Jersey; and she would throw up the window and sing out the news to Louisa May in the garden. “Mr. Fuller, in East Orange, is a third cousin twice removed!” she would call, hoping vainly for some enthusiastic response. But Louisa May just didn’t care about all these far-flung connections and considered Alma’s fascination with the subject a terrible waste of time, and a little silly into the bargain.

  “It’s not as if we came from anything grand,” she used to tell my mother, “and even if we did, what would be the good of knowing it?”

  Louisa May’s hobby was babies. She adored babies. To be sure, nobody in the neighborhood was known to harbor an active dislike of babies, but Louisa May went to the opposite extreme, and seemed to view each individual baby as the beginning and end of all human wonder. Wherever a new baby appeared, there too was Louisa May, hard on the heels of the doctor.

  My mother was fond of her, and she worried about her. “Louisa May,” she would say, “you ought to get married. It’s just a shame, the way you love babies, that you don’t have a family. And you don’t want to wait forever. You’re thirty-eight years old and it’s time you had your own babies. Now, you just find some nice man and marry him.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Lawson,” Louisa May said, “I don’t want to get married and have to fool with some old man around the house.”

  “But he wouldn’t be old!” Mother insisted. “You want a respectable young man who’s a good provider.”

  “Well, I don’t want any young man either,” Louisa May always said. “I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I ask myself, Would it be worth it to put up with a husband so I could have a baby? But I just can’t seem to decide it would. Alma and I have our own ways of doing and things go along pretty smooth, and I wouldn’t want to bring a stranger into the house.”

  Louisa May’s predicament was not openly discussed at home because my mother was particular about discussions of babies and how to get them. But my father was equally particular about having all of us under his nose at the supper table, and at least two or three times a week he missed my little brother Louis.

  “I suppose Louisa May Fuller has got him again,” he would grumble. “Why in hell doesn’t Louisa May get married and have her own children and quit borrowing Louis?”

  Of course this was partly Louis’s fault—he loved to have Louisa May borrow him because she let him eat raw cookie dough and ride around on her vacuum cleaner.

  “Louisa May doesn’t want to get married,” Mother said. “She doesn’t want to fool with a man around the house.”

  “Well, she could fool with one long enough to get some babies, and leave mine alone.”

  I didn’t see my mother kick him under the table, but I saw him wince, and the subject was changed to some less interesting topic of the day—less interesting to me, at any rate. Louis wouldn’t have cared, because he was only five years old, but I was almost eight and just barely smart enough to know that there were mysteries beyond my ken, and that one such mystery had to do with babies.

  I concluded that there must be mysteries beyond my father’s ken, too, in view of his remark; for if I didn’t know anything else about the subject, I did know that the only way in the world to get a baby was to get married. All the available evidence supported that conclusion. In the first place, that was what I had been told; and in the second place, no unmarried ladies of my acquaintance had babies. Like most little girls, I shared Louisa May’s enthusiasm and took it for granted that if there were some other way to get babies, everybody would have a few—my schoolteacher, Miss Lincoln; my aunt Blanche; Miss Styles, who worked at the grocery store; Louisa May, of course . . . maybe even Alma.

  I was therefore both amazed and delighted to discover that I was wrong when Louisa May—though still unmarried—got a baby.

  Not all at once—she took the usual length of time. But since Louisa May was so large and so comfortably padded, it was five months before her condition began to arouse speculation . . . and another month before Alma noticed anything amiss.

  Then Alma brought my mother half of a coconut layer cake. “Too bad to have it go stale,” she said, “and Louisa May and I can’t eat it all up—or shouldn’t, anyway. I’ve noticed of late that Louisa May is putting on weight, and I try to help her curb her appetite.”

  Louis and I loved the cake and ate most of it feeling sorry for Louisa May who apparently couldn’t eat it.

  “Just because she’s fat?” Louis shook his head.

  Naturally there was gossip, but it was sketchy and disorganized. There was nothing anyone could put a finger on, so to speak, until one day when Mother quite innocently called across the street, “How are you, Louisa May?”

  Louisa May came right over, beaming. “Oh, Mrs. Lawson, I feel wonderful, and I’m just going to tell you why because I know you’ll be happy for me. I thought a lot about what you said—about getting married and all, and especially about being thirty-eight and not waiting too long; and, Mrs. Lawson, I just got afraid to wait anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” Mother said, puzzled but relieved.

  “I knew you would be. I don’t know what Alma will say. She’s not as crazy over babies as I am, and I just know she’ll think I should have got married anyway, but”—and Louisa May shrugged—“this opportunity came along and I just thought, Well, why not?”

  My mother was speechless. In her moral firmament there existed good women and bad women, and though she had never personally known any bad women, she had a clear image of how they looked and behaved. They would be gaudy, she felt, and rough and coarse, with brassy hair and low-cut dresses. Louisa May, on the other hand, was as plain, and as good, as homemade bread.

  Furthermore, Mother had a vague, uneasy notion that she herself had somehow aided and abetted this state of affairs.

  Alma turned out to have the same notion. At some point she took a good look at Louisa May and realized that her weight problem was neither permanent nor proper, and she came charging across the street to accuse Mother of encouraging immoral behavior.

  “I didn’t encourage her,” Mother said. “I never said it was all right. I just wanted her to get married.”

  “Oh, how lovely that would be!” said Alma hysterically. “But she didn’t, and just see the fix she’s in, and she’s not even ashamed a little bit. I don’t know what in the world to do!”

  Mother felt sorry for Alma. “Maybe she could go away somewhere. . . .”

  “She won’t. She says they might take the baby away from her but that old Dr. Barney will let her keep it, and he will, he will! You know how soft he is, and what will I do?”

  This didn’t make much sense to Louis and me but we were glad Louisa May didn’t have to go anywhere she didn’t want to go.

  “She won’t say who the father is,” Alma went on. “She says it’s none of my business. She says—” Here Alma choked. “She says he was a nice man and for me not to worry about it.”

  Mother was so flabbergasted by the whole affair that she had no shock left to spare for this, nor even much curiosity, and my father seemed torn between outright astonishment and a kind of grudging approval on the grounds that he would no longer have to hunt around for Louis.

  Louisa May did in fact fail to exhibit the least
shred of shame or regret and she did not go away somewhere, but she did oblige the neighborhood by staying within doors as much as possible until her baby was born. It was a boy, which was what Louis had said it would be, but he did not claim any special credit for this.

  Louisa May bought a very expensive imported perambulator, and what little time she was not feeding the baby, bathing him or rocking him, she wheeled him up and down the street with a rose stuck through the roof of the carriage, humming little tunes and literally commanding people to see how beautiful he was. She called him “darling” and invited other people to call him that too until she hit upon exactly the right name for him.

  Nobody needed a second invitation to view the baby, so great was the curiosity as to his parentage. No baby was ever scrutinized more carefully for identifying features, nor with so little satisfaction—for when he got to look like anybody at all, it turned out to be Louisa May: a distinct disappointment to all.

  That was later, though. For the time being he looked pretty much like most babies: plump, bald, rosy. He was an unusually happy baby, which prompted someone in the neighborhood to remark, “Love babies always are”—although on the face of it, Louisa May’s baby hardly fell into that category. He was so happy, I suppose, because Louisa May didn’t allow anything to make him unhappy, and his healthy good humor was almost an affront to decent, respectable women whose babies were fussy or fretful or colicky or pale or cross-eyed.

  Won over by the baby and influenced by Louisa May’s own attitude (she simply ignored the whole question of the baby’s beginnings, as if he had just appeared one day out of thin air), most people quit trying to sort out the moral issues of the case. Reverend Seagraves was asked by one or two of his flock to please call upon Louisa May, and did so, but with no clear purpose in mind and no visible result. Had Louisa May sought counsel, he would have counseled her; had she sought comfort, he would have comforted her; but as it was, all he could do was hold the baby while Louisa May cut him a quarter of a Gravenstein apple pie and read him recent correspondence from the missionary in Bechuanaland.

  He ended up by offering to baptize the baby on the first Sunday of the month, although, as he said, he wasn’t sure how the congregation would feel.

  He need not have worried. Nobody expected or wanted the baby to suffer, and even the most puritanical of the parishioners seemed to take the view that here was a baby who needed to be baptized. For most people, though, there was a less lofty consideration. Since the baby didn’t look like anybody, they pinned their hopes on having him named for somebody, and there was every indication that church attendance on that Sunday would set new, towering records.

  My mother was shocked by this. “There are people planning to go to church this Sunday,” she said indignantly, “who haven’t been inside the church since they were baptized!” At first she said she wouldn’t go, and then she said my father wouldn’t go, and then Louisa May asked both of them to stand up with her and be the baby’s godparents, which delighted Louis and me.

  My father said at least that way they would be sure of getting a seat, which made Mother so mad that she didn’t speak to him for over an hour. It was no joking matter, she said.

  It was not, to her. My mother’s moral code was simple, uncompromising and, up to now, uncluttered by doubt. She believed that virtue is its own reward and that the evildoer will reap the whirlwind, but Louisa May had scrambled these precepts. Besides, Mother loved Louisa May and didn’t want her to reap any whirlwind. Neither, though, could she ignore what was a clear and definite lapse of virtue.

  She agreed to be the baby’s godmother because she knew Louisa May wouldn’t ask anyone else, and she felt it would be compounded cruelty to deny the baby honorary parents when he didn’t even have a full complement of real ones.

  I was thrilled about the whole thing because I thought it would give me an in with the baby, and he was so generally admired that his good favor amounted to a juvenile status symbol. Neither I nor any of my friends understood exactly how Louisa May came to have him, and though we wondered about it, we didn’t wonder nearly as much as our parents thought we did. We just assumed, variously, that he had been brought by a stork, found under a pumpkin or left on Louisa May’s doorstep by a band of gypsies, and we really didn’t much care.

  On the morning of the baptism we were about fifteen minutes ahead of time, but already the church was filling with people. “The baby has a lot of friends,” I whispered to Louisa May, and she smiled.

  Father, Louisa May with the baby on her lap, Alma and I all sat together in one pew, saving a place for my mother. She and Louis were coming with our neighbors the Pendletons because there wasn’t room in our car, and as the organist started the opening hymn my father began to look around and mutter, “Wonder what’s become of her?” I tried to see too, but there were too many people. It was my feeling that Mother was probably stuck back at the door, unable to push her way through, but then I saw Mrs. Pendleton, with her hat on crooked, steaming down the aisle.

  She leaned across me and said, “Louis stuck a bean up his nose and we had to take him to a doctor. They’re still there. You’ll just have to go ahead without her.” She started away and then turned back. “Louis is all right, you understand. It’s just that—”

  “He stuck a bean up his nose,” my father said. “I see. Thank you.”

  The hymn over, Reverend Seagraves came down out of the pulpit to the baptismal font.

  “Never stuck a bean up his nose before,” I heard my father mutter as he stepped out of the pew and started to follow Louisa May up the aisle. I was sorry for Mother, who was going to miss what I considered her big moment, but very proud of my father, who was going to stand beside Louisa May and assume responsibility for her baby before God and man and our entire congregation and a considerable number of total strangers.

  I guess the same thought occurred to him, because he stopped three rows up, and then, after a moment’s pause, came back and got me. “You come too, Mary Elizabeth,” he said “You can take your mother’s place.”

  Poor baby, to be represented by such a group. Only Louisa May seemed to be in full possession of herself. Reverend Seagraves was trying to sustain the shock of the unexpected size of his congregation, and to overlook the appearance of a distinctly minor child as a baptismal sponsor. I assumed that Louisa May would hand me the baby, according to the usual procedure, but instead she handed him to my father, who looked very much surprised and immediately handed him to Reverend Seagraves, who also looked surprised, because he already had his hands full. But I suppose he didn’t like to hand him on to anyone else—especially not back to my father, who had almost dropped him the first time around.

  Louisa May, however, remained perfectly serene, and at the appropriate moment pronounced the baby’s name as if it were as common, say, as Charlie.

  It was not, and all those who had hoped for revelation in the naming of this baby had their hopes dashed. Louisa May named her baby Hannibal—a name never connected with anybody or anything in our community. It was her one indirect concession to public opinion, for surely, all things being equal, she would have preferred a name more natural to the ear. But she offered neither explanation nor justification for the name, except to say that Alma thought there might once have been another Hannibal Fuller way back in the genealogy. Alma hadn’t thought any such thing, but she liked the idea of it so much that she came to believe it was true, and from then on spent most of her time trying to track him down.

  My father hurried us away right after church, and Louisa May let me hold Hannibal on the way home. He was soft and warm and sleepy and probably quite uncomfortable, smashed against my bony chest.

  “Will you tell him someday that I’m his godmother?” I asked.

  “Well, more like godsister, maybe,” Louisa May said. “Oh, yes, I’ll surely tell him.”

  “I’ll take him to school when he’s old enough,” I said, “and Sunday school. I’ll watch out for him.”
/>   “I count on you,” she said.

  The excitement of the day, the weight of Hannibal upon me, the warmth of the sun through the window of the car, all made me as drowsy as the baby.

  “Where did you get him from?” I asked.

  Alma gasped. “Why, we went out one morning to fetch the milk . . .” she began.

  “Not quite,” Louisa May said, and then to me, “The where and the how is a mystery. As for the why, just say I wanted him a whole lot, and was old enough to take good care of him.”

  My mother was home from the doctor and waiting for us. “I took a taxicab,” she said. “There was no use going to the church so late. How did it go?”

  “Well . . .” Father sat down heavily on the living-room sofa. “You can just about imagine . . . everybody and his uncle there in the church. I walked right past the Ferguson brothers. Saw Amos Ball a couple of pews over. Ed Wiggins . . .”

  “Oh, well,” my mother said.

  “Oh, well? Comes the big moment and who walks up the aisle with Louisa May and her baby? Me! By myself.”

  “Well, people must have known . . .”

  “What? That Louis stuck a bean up his nose? I doubt it. Besides, there were people there who don’t know me from Adam’s off ox—perfect strangers.” He took out his big white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “Worst spot I ever was in. Then Louisa May gave me the baby and I didn’t know what to do with him.”

  “Why didn’t you give him to me?” I asked, and Mother stared at me.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I was there too. I went up with Daddy. I’m Hannibal’s godsister.”

  “Hannibal?”

  “Hannibal,” my father repeated, and shrugged. “Well, she couldn’t very well name him Frank, or George, or Bill.”

  “She could have named him Fred,” I said, “for you.”

  He mopped his head again. “I thought of that. Oh, yes, that occurred to me while we were standing up there.”