Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  “Dear Lord,” I prayed with one hand on my belly. “Thank you … thank you for all that you have given … for my three sons … for mothers … for sunshine … flowers and … for the new life within me.”

  It was easier than I thought to conjure up a few things I felt grateful for, and by the end of my prayer, I felt at peace, and I had a new, yet ancient perspective that maybe God had a purpose and a plan in giving me a daughter at a time like this. Surely he must have thought I could handle it—what woman, after having three sons, couldn’t—or He wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.

  I looked around the room I had lived in for weeks on end, and then I glanced down the long hallway with the sun shining through the window and beaming down against the hardwood floor. I didn’t know how the sun or the moon did it, how they made everything from a mud puddle to a wooden floor to a sea look more beautiful. I wondered whether it looked like that every morning. Maybe it was God who made things glisten when we really needed them to or helped us take notice of beauty that is always there whether we see it or not. Today, I would walk down that glistening hallway.

  I got dressed, not caring about fashion. Solids or small figured prints, beading, a hem that fluctuated between a few inches above the ankle and the instep, medium to heavy fabrics like serge and gabardine—none of that mattered to me now or, come to think of it, ever.

  “Can you find me a white carnation?” I asked my assistant when she came in the room, surprised to see me up and dressed.

  She pointed toward the flowers the boys had given me.

  “Those are for me,” I said. “It was nice of the boys. But I also want to honor my mama today, and the custom is that if your mother is alive, wear a colored carnation. If she has passed away, then wear a white one.”

  “Ah, si, si,” said Nora, nodding her head, and then leaving my room.

  I stood there waiting for her to return, and when she did, she was carrying a white carnation and helped me pin it to my blouse.

  “Thank you,” I said and headed out my door and down the long glistening hallway with the morning sun coming through. I didn’t go far, just to Leo’s office to figure out what it was that I was going to do as provider of this family. My options were slim. I certainly wasn’t going to pose semi-nude in any soap advertisements. Writing a novel would take too long, a year, two maybe three being that it was my first, and even then, there was no guarantee that it would get acquired by a publisher, or sell. There was just one thing to do: write more articles—write more articles than I had ever written before!

  I drank three strong cups of Nora’s espresso and then skimmed through the stack of unread papers and publications that had been delivered to our house and piled up since Leo’s death. I took notes as I perused, then looked up addresses in Leo’s files, those of people we had socialized with and those he had talked about from work and even those I didn’t know but who attended his funeral.

  And despite it being Sunday and a new nationally declared holiday, I wrote letters to them all. I told them I needed work and suggested all kinds of ideas I thought would make interesting stories such as: How have mothers traditionally been honored and the efforts leading up to today being declared a national holiday? And what about fathers? There were more stories I thought of. With war in Europe looming, what were women doing to prepare should their men have to leave? Then I mentioned that Teddy Roosevelt, it was rumored, was heading to Captiva Island, Florida to trophy fish. I could go there, bump into him and interview him, the former president on his views concerning the likeliness of America entering the war. And my God, while there, I could look up Jaden. But I doubt they would like the former president story, and come to think of it, Jaden probably wouldn’t like me anymore. I was the mother of three boys and pregnant with a daughter.

  And in just two hours of writing letters, I felt confident I would have at least five different articles to write and five different deadlines, all from different publications. I had created for myself a lot of work to do, work that would have to wait until Monday, for the boys were due back any time. Today I would spend with them. Monday I would start my interviews. Tuesday, write the stories. Wednesday, I’d edit those stories, and as soon as I heard back from the publications, I would submit them. Friday, I would determine whom I had to let go first. It wouldn’t be Nora. I would hold on to her until my last penny, for she had been by my side during the delivery of each of my sons, and I was fond of her, despite her speaking mostly Spanish and my not understanding seventy-five percent of what she said.

  But all of that could wait, I decided as I walked back down the hall, out the front door, and around back to our shed. That is where we kept my bicycle. I walked it out into the light and stood there holding onto the handlebars for a moment. It had been awhile since I last rode.

  “It should be easy,” I told myself. “Once you learn, you never forget how. And if you fall, you just get back up again.”

  I took off in the direction of where the boys were playing golf. I wanted to surprise them.

  XLI

  LYDIA

  JACK WAS NAPPING CONTENTEDLY on the blanket beside me when I finished reading and closed the journal. The sun was too high now to beam through the window, so I scooped him up and placed him in his crib. He was an easy baby, still napping three times a day, but I couldn’t imagine three of him. I didn’t know how Ava would manage with three sons and a daughter on the way and no husband to help and support her. Then again, she was a strong woman and she was on her way. I found it inspiring the way she got out of bed like that and forced herself into that office, then outside where she would ride her bicycle to the course where her boys were golfing.

  As I walked over to my own bicycle propped against the wall behind the bathroom door, I thought about my own situation—a single working mother—and wondered how I might make it all work. I wondered whether I was still as bold and courageous as I once was—the girl who applied to college against my father’s resistance and who stood up in class and disagreed not just with the teacher, but with an entire decade of people who believed a proper woman has no other options but to marry and keep a clean house. I was the girl who insisted on riding the bus not the limousine and that hopped off the bus because she saw flowers and wanted beauty in her life. I was the girl working at the paper after school making the best coffee she could make because she knew that the tiny steps would get her where she wanted to go. I was a girl with hopes and dreams.

  I picked up a towel laying on the bathroom floor and started wiping the spokes of my bike. I was still that girl. Once a girl rides toward dreams and goals, she never forgets how. She may fall down from time to time, but all she must do is get back up. And when she does, she might find she’s stronger than she once was.

  If I could push a baby into the world, I could do most anything, for what female sport is more strenuous and incredible than that? Raising the baby maybe, but it was too soon to think about that. I had to push, push myself harder at work and ride with more strength than ever in the direction of my goals.

  XLII

  CHICAGO

  1968

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  Lydia

  The next four years were turbulent ones for our world, and I wondered often whether writing about a new freedom in hemlines and bolder-colored dresses would have been the more pleasant career choice. But I worked my way out of issues pertaining to women and into news of interest to men, women, and our nation as a whole.

  When President Johnson ordered air raids against North Vietnam in early 1965, I started paying closer attention to the war that had been under way for some time already. And I went to Washington in April to cover a large anti-war rally. It was my first major news story, and I was assigned to interviewing university students from all over the country as to why they were protesting the war.

  Jack stayed home with Rosie, his nanny. She was a young woman, in her mid-twenties, and plain without makeup or style in her hair, and she refused to wear any hem
lines above her knee. Jack didn’t need a fashion-savvy girl watching after him. He needed, or so I thought, someone like Rosie. She loved babies and children and desperately longed for a boyfriend so she might marry and move to the suburbs, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that maybe men might notice her more if she let her hair down and put lipstick on those tiny lips of hers. I also felt like giving her a friendly nudge into the sixties, for she was still wearing button-down sweaters daily.

  But she was good with Jack, and she was reliable. She knew my work schedule and never showed up late and stayed until whenever I came home, whether that was around Jack’s evening bath or later. She made me believe that Jack and I were her only life. Occasionally, when I came home extra late, she’d sleep on the cot, but usually she insisted on returning home. She lived with her parents in an apartment three blocks away. I still lived in the tiny shoebox, but I swore as soon as the world and my job slowed, I’d start scouting around for a bigger and better place.

  During the day, she’d walk Jack over to her parents’ house in his stroller, or to the parks or around the city so they wouldn’t have to be confined to the four walls of the tiny apartment. I saw it as good for Jack. Boys are meant to be outdoors, weather permitting. They’re like puppy dogs. They need to be walked daily, and a few times a day is better than just once and it doesn’t matter that they were out the day before. They’ve got to get out every single day!

  It hurt me to think that I wasn’t the one walking him every day, pointing out the pigeons and the clouds in the sky, but I had to provide for us. At times I envied Rosie for spending time with him.

  By Christmas of that same year American troop strength was at nearly 200,000 and growing, combat losses totaled 636 Americans killed, and, here at home, draft quotas had been doubled. I had written a few stories pertaining to the draft and struggled personally with the news of casualties. Maybe if I weren’t a mother, it would be simpler to write such stories, for all I could think of when I heard about the men being drafted was that they were just grownup baby boys. Shame on me, for I know a journalist is supposed to remain objective, but does that mean nonaffected?

  Every night I came home from work and picked Jack up in my arms, whether he was awake or not. I cradled him and rocked him, unable to imagine my own son ever being drafted off to war. I wanted time to go by slowly. I didn’t want Jack growing up in time for any war.

  Men. They’ve had rights all along, rights that women haven’t always had, including working overtime and the night shift. But men—they’ve had to do things no woman would envy. I would never want to do what those men were over there doing, and I could no longer relate to the feminists wanting to be treated in every single way like men. That movement had become a bit too extreme for me to identify with fully, not to say I wasn’t grateful for the strides they were making.

  Thanks to them, I was glad to be a woman in this world, now more than ever. In 1966, women had federal protection from discrimination in the workplace, and I felt more secure at my job than ever. I was part of a small group of women covering the Vietnam War. Hardly any women were actually sent there, so I covered angles from here at home. About ninety-nine percent of desks in the newsroom still belonged to men, and women were still mostly section writers in the features department, or they covered education and medicine, but more and more, women like myself were marching into hard news.

  There were, however, unspoken rules that existed in the newspaper business at this time and I lived accordingly.

  “Sorry, but I’m divorced,” I’d say anytime a man—and there were many—around the office gave me the look or asked me out. It was a lie, but a woman who was married or searching for a man was labeled a short-timer with regard to her career. I, on the other hand, never had a husband but played the part of being divorced. It worked for me. Divorced women were considered “serious” journalists.

  Even sources I interviewed for stories asked me out “off the record,” and again I’d reply, “I’m flattered. But you better try someone else. I’m bitter and divorced and not the least bit interested in any relationship.”

  I became known as the woman married to her work, and that was exactly what I wanted. I had no intentions of becoming anyone’s wife and of letting any man ground my career after working hard to get to where I was. The only male I thought I needed in my life was little Jack. But the bigger he got, the more he talked. At first, things were simple. “Clouds. Clouds. Clouds,” he’d squeal on my days off when I walked him to the city parks. But soon it turned to, “Birdies. Birds. Pigeons. Poopy.”

  “Jack,” I’d scold. “Don’t say ‘poopy’ so loud. It’s a word meant to be whispered.”

  “Pigeons. Mommy pigeon. Nanny pigeon. Baby pigeon.”

  “That’s right,” I answered aware that one of these days Jack might ask where all the daddy pigeons are, including his own. But as the number of American troops was increasing and the draft quotas doubled, I feared that Jack’s daddy might become a statistic. I thought of Josh daily. It was hard not to. As Jack grew bigger, he looked more and more like his father, and it was hard for me not to think about him. Jack had his daddy’s eyes and his love for nature, something so strong that even a baby brought up in downtown Chicago couldn’t hide. When I took Jack to the park just two blocks away, it would take us an hour to get there because he stopped to observe worms or dried-up leaves or green things growing from the sidewalk cracks. I know he didn’t get those outdoorsy fetishes from me!

  Josh’s two years of volunteer work in the Peace Corps had ended, and he was probably back in Florida, where I wanted him to be. However, I feared the father of my child might get away once more. I thought about what Ava had said in her last entry, that she could think of nothing worse than a father not knowing of the existence of his own child.

  One morning I decided I had to catch Jack’s daddy before he got drafted, before he got away once more. I had to tell him I loved him and that another little person in the world would too and that we were willing to pick up and relocate and do anything necessary to make it work—that is, if he was interested.

  There are perks to being a journalist. I spent that entire morning at work making investigative phone calls until I learned all I needed to know about Josh’s whereabouts. My worst fear had already come true. He finished his assignment in the Peace Corps and went straight to getting drafted. He was already in the midst of the war and had been for several months. I put my head down on my desk and cried. I cried because he wasn’t at all a fighter. He was a peaceful man, wanting to fish and boat and play music. And then, I walked into my boss’s office and begged to go there to Vietnam.

  My boss refused to send me there, saying he already had enough journalists assigned to that region. I knew the truth. He didn’t want to send any more women there. He only wanted male journalists to cover horrific things. And it was probably a good thing, for Jack needed me more than the war needed my coverage of it. But for the next several months I followed the horrific events and the casualty reports as they came into the newsroom, and I started praying for the poor men out there, especially Josh, as I had never prayed before. It felt good to pray. I had hardly ever asked anyone for help with anything, but now, I was asking help from God, and it felt okay to be doing so. I always assumed I’d save my prayer requests for a time when I might be starving, homeless, or dying, but it dawned on me that two of those three things—starving and homeless—might never happen and the third—dying—would surely come but might come all of a sudden, leaving me no time for prayer, so I started now and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

  And like Ava, I found it easy to thank God, and soon I prayed so consistently that I started feeling as if the Lord was living beside me like a constant companion. I found comfort in praying and began to realize why it was that people did it in the first place. Any time the slightest fear crossed my mind, I muttered, “Please, Jesus, hold Josh in your arms, wherever he might be and keep him safe. I pray for a miracle. May Josh hear mus
ic in the midst of the chaos he’s in.”

  And as I held Jack in my arms and sang to him at night, I wanted for him to have the chance to meet his father. I was no longer an immature woman selfishly obsessing over the guy she once loved. I was now a mother longing more than anything for the father of her son to be alive and well. I felt guilty and ashamed for having kept the baby a secret from him all this time. I felt like a thief, one who robbed a good man of the right to know he has a son. I felt haunted by what I had done and considered picking up my life and moving to Sanibel, where I could at least let Jack’s grandfather know so he could begin a relationship with Jack in the meantime. But, no, I couldn’t do that to Josh. He would have to be the first to know the news of his son, and I would just have to pay the consequences of my crime and wait. Wait and pray until the war ended or Josh got sent home. I had resources, and I would check on his status and whereabouts daily.

  In the meantime, I would have to focus on my career and trust that Jack was in good hands with his nanny. I surrendered him the best I could to her, but then one December day in 1967, I learned that nanny wasn’t who I wanted Jack spending another day with. I was working on anti-war stories, one in particular that sent me to New York City. Rosie had never been to any city other than Chicago, and Jack had never been outside Illinois. I was making a fine salary and decided to take them along with me, treat them to a new city. As I conducted interviews during the day, I assumed they were lounging around the lavish hotel, waiting for me to return so we could have dinner. But when I returned from my assignments, I could find them nowhere.

  At first, I didn’t think much of it so I took a long, hot bath in an effort to unwind. It was then that the phone in our hotel room rang and I quickly hopped out of the bath and answered it, dripping wet and coated in bubbles.