As the weeks wore away, Bronwyn felt her dream fading into the distance, the way the steamships grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared over the horizon. Nothing gave her joy, neither her dance classes nor her friends’ company, neither shopping outings with her mother, nor the copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar that arrived in the mail. When she started being sick in the mornings, she thought it must be heartbreak that made her stomach churn. She hid her morning bouts of vomiting from her mother as best she could. The maid, Betty Jones, eyed her oddly, but Bronwyn ordered her out of her room, and told no one anything.
When her breasts began to swell and grow tender, she thought she must be really ill. It wasn’t until she realized she hadn’t had her curse in three months that she began to suspect. Bronwyn was ignorant, but she wasn’t stupid. Such symptoms meant something.
On a hot September morning, as she was dressing before her mirror, she froze, gazing in horror at her midsection. Her tummy was no longer flat. It curved outward, as if she had swallowed something enormous. It reminded her of a picture she had seen once of a python that had swallowed a rat, thin along its whole length except for the place the rat was stuck. She knew very little about how bodies worked, but she had seen pregnant women. Was that what the sweetness was about? Was it because of this swelling of the belly, and the dreadful outcome, that it was kept secret?
She had never gone to a doctor on her own. Her mother always took her, and stayed beside her during the examination. Her mother answered the doctor’s questions for her, and accepted medicine on her behalf. It was no different for Bessie and Clara. None of them had ever questioned it. If she tried to go on her own, now, the doctor would only insist on talking to her parents.
What was she to do? She pulled on her chemise to cover the swelling of her belly, and dressed herself in a loose cotton frock and her lightest stockings. She didn’t feel sick this morning, but hungry, ravenously hungry, hungry enough to put aside, for the moment, the anxiety that made her heart race. She felt as if a battle were going on in her body, her stomach and her heart at odds, a battle she was going to lose no matter what she did. She took up a hat and a pair of summer-weight gloves, and set off down the stairs for breakfast. Whatever it was that had taken over her stomach would have it no other way.
Cook had made a summer meal of soft-boiled eggs, fresh rolls, and a huge bowl of blackberries. Even looking at the blackberries made Bronwyn’s mouth water. She felt as if she couldn’t get enough of them, refilling her cut-glass bowl twice before she was done.
“Goodness, dear,” her mother said. “Be careful of too much fruit. You know what it does to you.”
“Yes, Mother,” Bronwyn said. She pushed the bowl aside, and replaced it with her eggcup.
Her mother eyed the gloves and hat waiting on the sideboard. “Are you going somewhere, dear?”
Bronwyn, as she cracked the eggshell with her spoon, said, “Yes. The library.”
Iris nodded approval. “Excellent idea. It’s going to be so hot today, and it’s always cool in the library.”
To forestall her mother’s deciding to come along, Bronwyn said, “Bessie and Clara are going to meet me there.”
“Oh, good. That sounds very nice, dear. Let me give you some money, and you girls can go to the soda fountain afterward.”
Bronwyn felt a quiver of compunction at her mother’s generosity, but it was nothing to the fear that gripped her anew now that her hunger was appeased. She accepted fifty cents, and dropped it into her little cloth handbag before she gathered up her gloves and hat, kissed her mother’s cheek, and set off down the hill.
It was terribly hot already, though it was only midmorning. The blackberries settled, heavy and cold, deep into her belly, but her head felt light and far above the rest of her body, as if it might disengage from her shoulders and go floating off into the blazing blue sky. She walked slowly, reluctance dragging at her steps. She trudged up the stone stairs of the Carnegie Library and pulled open the heavy door.
She moved gingerly through the shadowed stacks, passing the fiction sections she was accustomed to, peering at the titles in aisles she had never visited before. The shelves were packed with dusty tomes in forbidding colors of brown and burgundy and rusty black. Their titles made little sense to her, long names with words she barely recognized.
She didn’t dare ask the librarian for assistance. Miss Claymore kept a critical eye on the selections Bronwyn and her friends made, and refused to check out anything she deemed inappropriate. Any book that explained the mystery Bronwyn was trying to solve was certain not to meet with Miss Claymore’s approval.
Bronwyn understood that the Dewey decimal system organized books by topic, but she wasn’t sure how to refine her search. Wandering, frowning up at the shelves, she stumbled upon a section that appeared to contain medical texts. For twenty minutes she browsed in that area, pulling down a text here and there to try to make sense of the table of contents, but without success. At the end of one shelf was a stack of yellowing pamphlets, and she leafed through them, reading titles like Social Hygiene and Path to Purity, a Handbook for Young People. She opened one or two, encouraged by their covers, but the language inside was so oblique that they told her very little.
She tidied the stack, and replaced it. She felt bleary from breathing dust, and after feeling heated by the walk up Lawrence Street, she now felt as chilled as if she had walked into Aldrich’s meat locker. She stood for a moment, one trembling hand pressed to her swelling stomach, and told herself it didn’t matter. Books weren’t going to help her. Though she was mystified by exactly how it had happened, she was In Trouble.
It was the way they spoke of it, she and Bessie and Clara, and their mothers, too. Being In Trouble meant that a girl would disappear for a time, always with a lame excuse of visiting family or going abroad, explanations no one believed. It meant older women whispering behind their hands, falling silent when young girls came into the room. Once Bronwyn had asked her mother about it, and Iris Morgan had said firmly, “Nice girls don’t need to know about such things.”
“Wasn’t Patricia a nice girl?”
“I thought so once,” Iris had said primly. “Not anymore.”
Patricia was the eldest daughter of the baker in Port Townsend, someone who had often served Bronwyn and her mother from behind the counter. Bronwyn had admired her masses of black hair and her plump cheeks, always rosy from the ovens. One day Patricia had mysteriously vanished from the town, and Bronwyn had been forbidden to ask about her when she and her mother stopped to buy cinnamon rolls.
Bronwyn never learned what changed Patricia from a Nice Girl to one who was In Trouble, but Clara whispered that she was sent away because she was going to have a baby. The two of them had wondered how that could come about, since Patricia wasn’t married. Neither of them knew the answer, and they had no one they could ask.
Bronwyn realized, on that burning September day, that it was she who was no longer a Nice Girl. Her dreams were not coming true after all. Rather, the opposite had happened. She was ruined.
The mystery now, almost three years later, was why she didn’t dream of all of that. She remembered it clearly enough. There were those awful moments of understanding, of confession, of her mother’s stunned tears and her father’s outrage. She had thought she might die of misery when her father ruled that she would not be allowed—not even after it was all over—to study dance at the Cornish School. She was allowed to write a single letter to Preston Benedict. She received no reply.
Reading of Preston’s death, in the fire that destroyed his sister’s medical clinic, was a waking nightmare. She couldn’t bear to read the tragic reports in the Times, although her mother did, and told her all about them. She spent most of her pregnancy in a Vancouver hotel, facing her mother’s disappointment every single day. She suffered a long, difficult delivery, and when it was over, nothing was left to her.
She would have liked to dream of her baby, but those dreams never came.
She had only the memory of him, of holding him in her arms for a precious five minutes before he was whisked away.
Bronwyn dreamed instead, always and only, of those lost moments in the garden. Her dreams betrayed her. They tormented her with what could have been. What she had believed would be.
Now, after her night in the Cellar, she woke slowly, dry-mouthed and miserable. Hot June sunshine poured generously through her window, and glittered on the dancing waters beyond the glass, but the glorious weather held no joy. The taste of last night’s Fallen Angels was sour on her tongue, and her head throbbed with the aftermath of homemade gin. She could barely stand the brightness of sun in her eyes. She kept them half shut as she pushed aside her blankets and staggered into her bathroom. She splashed water on her face and ran her damp hands through her tangled hair. When she could open her eyes fully, she stared at herself in the mirror.
It hardly seemed possible three years could make such a difference in a person. Bruise-dark shadows dragged at her eyes, and her cheeks were hollow and pale. Her belly was marked with puckered lines where the baby had grown, the baby that was gone. Even her hair seemed to droop, to have lost the luster she and her mother had been so proud of. She should do something about all of it, she supposed. She hardly cared enough to try.
She walked back into her bedroom and opened her wardrobe. For long moments she gazed at the dresses hanging there, all neatly pressed and arranged by Betty. She would have to put something on. She would have to comb her hair, and go downstairs to endure her mother’s worried face. She would have to think of something to do to fill the long empty hours of the day.
The morning mail, waiting on the sideboard in the breakfast room, brought a card from Clara. Iris, her face bright with forced hopefulness, laid it beside Bronwyn’s plate. “Look,” she said. “Something from Clara! Isn’t that nice?”
Bessie had stopped speaking to Bronwyn when she and her family learned of her pregnancy, but Clara, it turned out, was a more faithful friend. She had written to Bronwyn every week during her exile. She had been waiting at the ferry dock when Iris and Bronwyn returned home, disdaining the whispers and shaken heads that followed them. Clara was married now, with her own tidy brick home just off Lawrence. Bronwyn was always welcome there, so long as Clara’s straitlaced husband wasn’t present. He knew, of course, about the Cellar, and the Fallen Angels, and all the rest of it. All of Port Townsend did, Bronwyn supposed. She told herself—and Clara—that she didn’t care, but it wasn’t true. She couldn’t help caring. She was nineteen years old, and the empty years of her life stretched ahead like a desert.
She picked up the small blue envelope with Clara’s familiar handwriting, and slit it open with the silver paper knife. “She’s having a tea,” she told her mother. “Next week.”
“You’re invited,” Iris said. She gave her daughter a brave, hopeful smile. “How nice!”
“We’re both invited, Mother, but . . .”
Iris gave a little, girlish clap of her hands. “Oh, dear Clara! Like old times! We’ll need new dresses, don’t you think?”
“Oh, Mother, I won’t be going,” Bronwyn said as she laid the card aside.
“But, dear heart, why not? It would be good for you to get out a bit.”
“It won’t be like old times, Mother.”
“Bronwyn, you need to see people. You should make some friends.”
“I have friends,” Bronwyn said. She kept her eyes down, avoiding her mother’s gaze.
“You never see them,” Iris said in a plaintive voice. Bronwyn didn’t answer, but slid the card back into its envelope.
There was a silence at the table, broken only by the maid carrying in a platter of toast and a coffeepot. Neither of them spoke again until she had backed out of the breakfast room, leaving the coffeepot on the sideboard. Bronwyn said then, for the dozenth time, “I need to leave Port Townsend, Mother.”
And for the dozenth time, Iris answered, “Oh, no, Bronwyn! Please don’t say that. You just have to be patient. Everything will settle down. Everything will be fine.”
Bronwyn, filled with sorrow for herself and her mother both, gave up the argument.
In the hospital in Vancouver there had been a doctor, a middle-aged, pleasant-looking man, who examined Bronwyn, spoke with her mother, then ushered Iris out so he could speak to Bronwyn alone.
Bronwyn felt a wave of panic as she watched her mother leave. The doctor, whose name was something difficult, Hargreave or Harcourt, closed the door firmly behind Iris and turned to Bronwyn with his arms folded over his white cloth coat, his eyes suddenly gone hard behind his thick spectacles.
“Do you understand what’s happened to you, Miss Morgan?” he said.
Bronwyn had to swallow to moisten her dry throat before she found her voice. “I—I think—yes. I’m in trouble.”
“In trouble.” Dr. Hargreave, or whatever his name was, scowled. “That, Miss Morgan, is a euphemism.”
“I know,” she whispered, dropping her gaze to her lap. She was covered with a white sheet, but the doctor had looked under that sheet, probed her belly and her private parts while she scrunched her eyes tight in an agony of embarrassment. “I know what a euphemism is,” she said.
“What does it stand for, in this case?”
She stole a glance at his face from beneath the fringe of her hair. He looked tired. He also looked angry, but she didn’t think he was angry with her, which was a change. Everyone else in the world seemed to be angry with her. She looked down at her lap again, and wished she could put her clothes back on. “It means a baby,” she said, in a voice barely audible even to her own ears.
“That’s right. You’re going to have a baby.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she murmured. “I—I didn’t know.”
The doctor sighed, and there was a rustle of clothes and the whisper of his shoes on the tiled floor. Bronwyn said, “I’m sorry.”
“Of course,” he answered quietly. She lifted her gaze, and saw that he had turned his back to her. He had crossed to the window, and was staring out as he stripped the rubber gloves from his hands. “I don’t suppose there’s any question of the father meeting his responsibility?”
Her throat ached suddenly. “He died,” she said. That wasn’t the whole story, but it was the part that mattered. The part that left her without hope.
“Died.” The doctor sighed again, and Bronwyn thought he must be very tired indeed. When he turned, he didn’t look so much angry as he did sorrowful. “You didn’t understand you could get pregnant, I suppose, Miss Morgan.”
Bronwyn looked into his dark eyes, glistening and large through his round spectacles. “I thought he loved me. I didn’t really know—I thought he was courting me.”
“Do you know how babies get started?”
She shook her head.
“Well.” He sighed again, and threw the rubber gloves into a basin on the counter. “I’ve heard the same story from far too many young women like yourself.” He moved to the sink, where he turned on a tap and began to wash his hands, over and over, as if once wasn’t good enough. “It troubles me.” He stopped soaping his hands at last, rinsed them, and turned off the tap. As he took up a white towel, he said, “I’m going to tell you as much as I can about what happens when you have a baby, and I also want you—before you leave my hospital—to understand how a baby is conceived. And—” He finished drying his hands, and dropped the towel into a basket. “I’m going to make certain you know how to prevent it, if that’s what you want.”
“My mother . . .” Bronwyn began, but then stopped. She bit her lip. She didn’t want to be disloyal to her mother, but she was beginning to understand.
The weary look came over the doctor’s face again. “Yes, your mother. Most mothers, in fact, in your social class. She didn’t want to tell you, because she thought ignorance would keep you safe. Would keep you chaste.”
“Ignorance?”
“It’s an ancient concept, and it has
never been effective, but it persists just the same.” He pushed his thick glasses up to the top of his head, pushed his chair closer to the examination bed, and sat down. As he began to talk, using plain words and sometimes gestures, Bronwyn’s cheeks burned with shame.
The things the doctor told her had nothing to do with the moments of sweetness she had shared with Preston. The words, body parts and reactions and fluids, were coldly scientific. Impersonal. It was like hearing her father talk about bolts and screws and railroad ties. The doctor’s lecture had nothing to do with the love she had felt. He spoke of sponges and spermicides and condoms. He pointed to her belly, and discussed due dates and labor pains and forceps. She tried to listen, but her head began to ache and her mind to spin. None of it seemed real. None of it seemed to apply to her.
The feeling of unreality didn’t last. When her labor started, it was all too real, and very, very personal. Dr. Holcomb, which she knew by then was his name, was calm and reassuring, and stayed with her throughout the hours of agony, but it was still a wrenching experience.
And it was all for nothing. She heard her baby cry, and held him in her arms for only moments before he was gone, disappeared, as if he had never been. Her mother hugged her and promised that now they could all go back to normal. That they would forget all about it.
But Bronwyn knew better. Even then, despite her mother’s assurances, she knew it couldn’t be true. There would be no normal, not for her. And there would certainly be no forgetting.
CHAPTER 7
Preston dreamed, too, but not of Bronwyn Morgan, though he had taken such pleasure in seducing her in her own back garden, right under the noses of her parents. She had been by no means his only seduction, that summer of 1920, but she had been particularly luscious, with such young, sweet-smelling flesh and beguiling innocence. It had been abundantly clear that she knew nothing whatever of men or sex, yet she had quivered beneath him, crying out in ecstasy. If Port Townsend had not been such a long journey from Seattle he might have visited her again, but he hardly needed to go so far afield for his pleasures. Of course, he was wearing the sapphire around his neck in those days, and he was all but invincible.
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