Compromise with Sin

by Leanna Englert

  “How many women took a petition?”

  “Five at most.” Louise noticed Daisy’s smile and raised eyebrows. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. We have five allies we didn’t have before.”

  “Yes.” Daisy spoke the word with such gusto that Hercules awoke with a jerk. She stroked his head till he sighed and returned to sleep.

  After a light supper, Daisy put on her coat and took Hercules for a quick walk. When she returned, she started toward her bedroom. “Let’s get comfortable. I can’t stand this corset another minute.”

  Louise gladly changed into her nightgown, robe, and slippers. When Daisy returned to the living room, she was wearing pajamas and slippers and was carrying crocheted afghans, one of which she handed to Louise. “Here. The landlord is stingy with the heat.” Then she poured two snifters of brandy, and the women sat in the wicker chairs.

  Louise had noticed the chill but hadn’t said anything.

  Hercules begged at his mistress’ knee, and Daisy scooped him into her lap. He circled and settled, and she tucked the afghan around him.

  As they drank their brandy, talk centered on Dr. Weil, namely that Daisy had a crush on him and sometimes noticed signs that he had feelings for her.

  It was while drinking their second brandy that the conversation turned to New Lexington, a place both women had permanently left behind. Daisy exhibited a remarkable ability to remember their school days and the names of schoolmates.

  “Did you hear what became of your parents after you left?”

  Louise shook her head.

  “Remember the poor girl they called ‘Dumb Sandy’?” Daisy asked.

  “Of course. My father worked for her father.”

  Daisy snickered, and Hercules flinched. “You got in a fist fight with Charles Baumgartner because he and some other boys were teasing her.”

  “I’d almost forgotten. I got my nose bloodied. You know what he did that made me so mad?”

  “Oh, I remember it well,” Daisy said.

  “He put a live frog in Sandy’s lunch pail.”

  Daisy’s expression turned sober. “I envied what you did. Wished I’d had the nerve to beat him up myself.”

  She envied me?

  Daisy shifted the afghan over Hercules’ exposed hindquarters. “Be glad you left when you did. Her father caught yours having his way with her in the horse barn . . .”

  Louise gasped.

  “Horsewhipped him and ran him out of town. Your mother followed.”

  “My God, Daisy. It’s because I left.” Louise covered her mouth as she spoke. “He wouldn’t have bothered her if I’d stayed. I never considered the consequences of leaving.”

  “Then that’s why you left.”

  Louise nodded. “Poor Sandy.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “You don’t understand.” Louise heard her volume rising with a brandy-inspired confession. Her mind played its litany of sins: causing Pa to lust after her, failing to protect Ma, committing adultery, deceiving Frank, blinding Marie. And because she’d deceived Frank, causing the worst unintended consequence of all, the accident that killed him and Marie. “It’s always my fault.”

  Daisy reached over and placed her hand on Louise’s. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. You mustn’t blame yourself.” She stood, set Hercules in her chair, and patted Louise’s shoulder, then picked up both their snifters. “Another drink would do you good.”

  That night Louise awakened shaking from a dream. Pa was touching her in places he shouldn’t, trying to kiss her, and as she tried to fight him off he shoved her away, saying “Shame on you,” and calling her “daughter of the devil.”

  She lay awake, recalling how she had learned to read his eyes, the shift from indifferent to leering that meant she must run or fight. Over and over she’d uttered silent prayers: “Cleanse the evil in me that makes Pa lust for me. Rescue me from hell on earth. Smite Pa with your sword of righteousness.”

  At night when sleep would not come, she planned her escape down to the last detail. Only one thing kept her from carrying it out. She had to protect Ma.

  But everything changed one day soon after her twelfth birthday. She was bent over next to the rain barrel, dipping a pot in the water to rinse her hair, when Pa grabbed her from behind. In one swift movement, he threw up her skirt and pulled down her drawers. She whirled about to break his grip but her foot caught on the drawers at her ankles. From the corner of her eye, she spied Ma watching from the porch. Pa tripped and fell, giving her time to kick off her drawers and run across the garden, trampling the tender shoots in her path. She could not outrun him. She saw the rake lying in the potato patch. When she turned and raised the rake, Pa stopped. She swung the weapon like a baseball bat, but he ducked. Thrown off balance, she spun around in a full revolution that seemed to last an eternity, a peaceful hiatus from fear and anger that ended with the rake slamming squarely above his ear. Bloodied and screaming, his eyes bulging, he dropped and writhed on the ground. She ran from the garden and saw Ma hobbling down the porch steps. Louise ran for the road and never looked back.

  32

  November 1906

  Upon returning from Lincoln, Louise approached the Inn and saw workmen pushing wheelbarrows piled high with boards toward the scrap dealer’s horse-drawn wagon. More renovation. The latest, of which J.D. was very proud, was having the shingled exterior painted a hideous burnt orange. Gone was the warmth of brown. J.D. declared it too solemn, but Louise had always found it comforting, the Inn nestled naturally next to the woods. J.D. was even more proud of the elevator which had been installed next to the staircase. Adding to Louise’s disquiet, the lobby lacked the vitality of travelers coming and going. Instead there was the monotony of the same people playing cards or working jigsaw puzzles. Even though her apartment remained unchanged, the Inn no longer felt like home.

  Nearing the scrap dealer’s wagon, Louise was struck by the familiarity of its load of weathered boards. She hastened to bring the scene into full view, hoping to dispel her suspicions. She stopped abruptly. Louise knew those boards. Had tweezed their splinters from Frank’s hands, the very hands he had dreamed with, had used to rescue the old ship─and himself─from obscurity. Like the sculptor seeking his own immortality in preserving his subject: My name is Ozymandias . . . Now these men were tearing down Morrissey’s Folly.

  Making her way to the Inn’s front door, she avoided residents who sat in the Adirondack chairs watching men jam crowbars into the ship’s hull, tear away the boards, and expose the ribs beneath.

  Passing through the lobby she held her composure long enough to exchange pleasantries with the three friendly, blue-haired widows who sat working a jigsaw puzzle at their usual table.

  Standing outside her apartment, she fumbled for the lock through a blur of tears. Once inside she dropped to a chair and wept. Frank would have had a name for the blue-haired widows.

  It was near sundown when Louise answered a knock on her door. It was J.D. Holding a pipe wrench in one grimy hand, being a man who cultivated calluses and eschewed manicures these days, he looked at her with glazed eyes. His chest heaved with each drunken breath. “At your service, madam.” He grinned.

  Dovie had confided to Louise that she was worried sick over J.D. Since losing his bid for state senate two weeks earlier he had taken to drinking every day.

  He clutched the edge of the sink and lowered himself to his knees. Grunting, he squirmed into position to get at the pipe under the sink. He kept up a running commentary about cheap materials and workmanship and the ruinous effects of immigration.

  “There!” He stood up, dropped the pipe wrench, and stumbled but caught himself. When he lunged toward Louise, she thought he had simply lost his balance, but he grabbed her with grimy hands and placed a slobbery kiss on her mouth. She pushed him away and kneed him in the groin.

  He yelped and shielded his privates.

  She pushed him toward the door. “Shame on you. Now you
take your little pipe wrench and get out of here.”

  She slammed the door. Stepping back, her chest heaving, she stared at the door and reflected on what had just happened. There was more to widowhood than grief and loss. Was merely being a woman alone an invitation to men like J.D.? Sometimes a woman had to take off the kid gloves. It was good she had not been born a lady.

  She ran water in the kitchen sink and kneeled down to check the pipe. No leak. She stood, and suddenly the episode with J.D. took on new significance. What if he carried the scent of my gardenia bath salts? He could tell Dovie I had tried to seduce him.

  Betrayal. When had Louise first felt betrayed? By Pa? Was it betrayal when someone you never trusted proves untrustworthy? Ma! Now, there was betrayal that cut so deep she had buried it for years. Ma, watching her and Pa in the vegetable garden and turning away. But was I justified in running away, breaking my vow to protect Ma?

  Then betraying Frank. A good provider, and he loved her. Had I been honest with him, he might even have accepted another man’s child.

  Now given a chance, J.D. would betray Dovie, if he hadn’t already.

  33

  January 1907

  Louise spent a quiet New Year’s Day reflecting on the old year, impatient for the new. The following day, she went down to the lobby three times to check for mail. Each time she exchanged pleasantries with the elevator operator who, on the third trip, looked at her askance. When the mail finally arrived, there it was, the January issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal. Louise entered the elevator, gave the operator a polite nod, then paged through the magazine until she found Helen’s article, “I Must Speak: A Plea to the American Woman.”

  Once inside her apartment, she went to her chair in the back parlor and began reading. Her eyes settled on words intended to elicit the reader’s concern. But for her, the words brought back frightful memories: “The symptoms of the disease appear in the infant’s eyes soon after birth. The eyelids swell and become red, and about the second day they discharge whitish pus.

  “What is the cause of ophthalmia neonatorum? It is a specific germ communicated by the mother to the child at birth. Previous to the child’s birth she has unconsciously received it through infection from her husband. He has contracted the infection in licentious relations before or since marriage. ‘The cruelest link in the chain of consequences,’ says Dr. Prince Morrow, ‘is the mother’s innocent agency. She is made a passive, unconscious medium of instilling into the eyes of her newborn babe a virulent poison which extinguishes its sight.’” Louise gripped the arm of her chair. Feeling anything but innocent, she had to stop reading. When she’d asked Helen to write an article, she hadn’t considered how the words might rip open her old wounds. She set down the magazine and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  Returning to the back parlor, she sat and picked up the magazine. “In mercy let it be remembered, the father does not know that he has so foully destroyed the eyes of his child and handicapped him for life.” The old anger welled. “Risk of a medical complication,” Doc had said. “We’ll dispose of this burden.” At the time it seemed a ruse, but he had known the risk. The weight of this certainty sat on her chest, constricting her breathing. She stepped out to the balcony to clear her head and regain her composure.

  Then she returned to the parlor and continued to read.”It is part of the bitter harvest of the wild oats he has sown. Society has smiled upon his ‘youthful recklessness’ because Society does not know that ‘They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.’”

  Those words again. Her anger toward Doc was displaced by guilt that seized her almost like a living thing. She could go for long stretches seeming to have put it behind her, but it was lurking in the shadows, waiting for her next vulnerable moment. She would have to finish reading the article later.

  Louise arrived early for the January Committee meeting and found the library door already unlocked. Without thinking, she’d tried the door with her injured left hand. She bit her lip against the pain. She’d punctured that hand several days earlier as she jabbed an icepick at stubborn frost in her electric icebox. What had been a minor wound was now infected and streaked with red.

  Upon opening the library door she caught the scent of Doc’s pipe tobacco and the silver-bells sound of a woman’s laughter.

  Doc sat at the reading table tamping tobacco in his pipe, and across from him sat Irina, pen in hand. She was especially attractive today, wearing a peacock print silk scarf that flattered her blue-violet eyes.

  It was innocent enough. He was reviewing the curriculum for midwives that Irina and Bonita had drafted.

  “Join us,” Doc said. “Irina has a superb idea.”

  Louise hung up her coat and hat, removed her gloves, and took her usual seat at the table. She kept her left hand in her lap, hiding her ugly injury.

  As Doc explained, Irina watched him with sparkling eyes. “We’ll ask Argent Laboratories to provide silver nitrate for a demonstration project at Riverbend Hospital.”

  “The hospital has already agreed, contingent on us supplying the drops,” Irina said.

  “Thanks to Irina,” Doc said.

  That Doc had said “Irina,” not “Miss Taylor” did not escape Louise’s notice. Her hands in her lap, she absently twisted her emerald-and-pearl anniversary ring.

  “Also, we’re going to use some of Argent’s funding to provide sandwiches, coffee, and cookies at our midwives’ training sessions,” Irina said.

  “Nothing like free food to boost attendance,” Louise said. Since when did the two of them act on their own without bringing matters before the Committee?

  She sighed. “I had an incident last week talking to the Midlands Social Workers Society in Omaha. Social workers, mind you. A woman stood up and said, ‘You can say it’s not just immigrants who get the disease, but no one I know ever got it and never will.’ Then she pointed to the poster of Vinny on the easel and said, ‘There’s your typical case. If that boy isn’t a Dago, I’m a monkey’s uncle.’ It was like a knife through my heart, but I remained calm and acknowledged that the incidence is higher in big cities and crowded slums but that no class is spared. Then another woman argued that those numbers only reflected births in hospitals, and everyone knew that immigrants gave birth at home and never even bothered to get birth certificates.”

  “We could replace Vinny with a little blonde girl,” Irina said.

  Louise glared at her. “Then replace me, too.”

  “Surely you don’t mean it,” Doc said.

  The door opened, and Madge and Jerrylynn arrived. Bonita and Alice soon followed, and it wasn’t long before Louise’s cloudy mood lifted. Doc may have been chairman of the Committee, but at this meeting she was its star. The women gushed over Helen’s editorial to such a degree that it almost distracted Louise from throbbing pain.

  The Committee was making progress. Louise announced that the Bureau of Hygiene was considering a regulation, which Doc had drafted with Daisy’s help, requiring doctors and midwives to report all new cases of babies’ sore eyes. Modeled after a Massachusetts regulation, it was designed to identify babies and families in need of follow-up services from social workers and visiting nurses, gather demographic data which was expected to show that babies’ sore eyes affected families in all parts of the state and of all social classes, and to serve as a first step toward getting doctors and midwives to comply with drops once they were mandated.

  “Lest you think half the battle is won, let me tell you we face strong opposition,” Louise said. “One senator actually told Dr. Weil that babies should be allowed to go blind so that they and their mothers will serve as an example of the wages of sin.”

  “No!” Madge said. “How cruel and ignorant.”

  Once the Committee members’ outrage subsided, Louise said, “I have some good news. Helen Keller will be in Omaha to attend a conference in February, and she has offered to lend support to our Nebraska campaign.”

 
; Spirits soared.

  After the meeting Doc approached Louise as she was picking up papers. “Congratulations on getting Miss Keller’s endorsement.”

  As she was sliding papers into her satchel, he said, “That’s a nasty looking wound. Come to my surgery and I’ll lance it.”

  “It will be fine, thank you.”

  He exhaled noisily. “I can lance it now or amputate later.”

  Louise followed Doc into his surgery, a tidy room that reeked of alcohol.

  He turned on a lamp at the end of the examining table. “If you don’t mind standing, the light is better over here.” He washed his hands, then gathered together a scalpel, gauze, and bottles of alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.

  When he turned and faced her across the table, she thought she saw a glint of recognition, that this moment evoked the night they stood across from one another treating victims of The Twister. That night Doc had selected her, seemingly at random, to assist him, and in spite of inexperience and self-doubt, she managed to administer morphine, dress mangled limbs, and comfort victims and survivors. She remembered the glow within when, at the end of the long night, Doc said, “You performed your duties as skillfully as a trained nurse.” The affair and its life-altering consequences had so eclipsed the memory of that experience, that only now did she recognize the special power of that night, the awakening to possibility, to a sense that within her lay untapped passion not of a carnal nature but something even more profound. She had thrived on becoming so lost in a worthy task that nothing else—appearances, respectability, achievements—mattered.

  Doc patted the table indicating where she should place her hand. His gaze suggested a desire for connection and took her back to a moment when she could reach up and touch distant constellations. She had to look away. That feeling, she recalled, was one that both Doc and Frank had once had the ability to arouse. Or had she been so desperate for intimacy she ascribed meaning to a certain look, a meaning that might not have been intended? Had she felt exalted because she imagined it so?