by T. Greenwood
“With a little spit shine, it could be a real beauty,” he had said, nodding at the house across the street. That was one thing about Frankie. He was able to see the potential in things. I’m fairly certain that was the only reason why he’d wound up with me in the first place. When he’d first met me, ineptly typing a whopping forty words per minute at Simon & Monk, a large insurance firm in Cambridge, a pencil stuck in my frizzy red hair and refusing to wear a girdle, it wasn’t my great beauty he’d been riveted by but rather what he might be able to turn me into. I was a fixer-upper in his eyes. A girl with some real potential.
Growing up on my parents’ farm in Vermont, I’d wanted nothing but to get away as soon as I graduated from high school. I’d been accepted into Wellesley College, but my parents insisted that I turn down my spot and go to secretarial school in Boston so that I might make something useful of myself. What they really meant was that I should find a husband, start a family. If I’d gone to Wellesley, I’d have been surrounded by girls, with no marriage prospects in sight. My mother’s dreams were not of a girl on the college swim team, an academic, a librarian (which is what I’d hoped to be). They were, instead, of grandchildren and holidays spent around an upright piano no one but my mother knew how to play, singing Christmas carols. I’d have gone to Wellesley anyway, but I had no way to pay the tuition. It didn’t help that Gussy had just gotten married to her own Frank (Frank McInnes, her high school sweetheart); my mother wouldn’t rest until both of her girls were safe from spinsterhood.
When my Frank came into the office where I was pounding at the behemoth electric typewriter with two fingers, he saw me as a project, and I saw him as a way to appease my mother. Unfortunately, he was no Frank McInnes. For one thing, he was Italian. And even worse, he was Catholic. My Frank couldn’t be further from Gussy’s Frank with his quiet intelligence, his good looks, and manners, and my mother would never let me forget that. But Frankie was vibrant and loud and funny, and I liked him. And better yet, he liked me.
That’s what my thinking had been when Frankie Valentine, all five feet six of him, walked into the office where I worked pushing his mail cart and whistling “O Sole Mio.” When he leaned against the desk where I was miserably typing up underwriting forms and said in his slow, sly way, “Well, if it isn’t the new girl. And even prettier than they say.” (I’d never once in my life been referred to as pretty.)
That was my thinking when Frankie took me out dancing and managed to make me feel graceful for the first time in my whole life, when he crooned like Vic Damone in my ear, his breath hot, both his feet and hands quick. When he walked me back to my apartment and kissed me on my doorstep. (A man had never put his hands—or lips, for that matter—on me before, and certainly never sang love songs in my ear.)
And that was my thinking when I told Frankie I’d marry him: that he was the first and only man who had loved me (who might ever love me enough to marry me), and as a plus, I’d be getting my mother off my back while still getting in one last jab. That had been my modus operandi for most of my life at that point. I truly didn’t think beyond that moment when I walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Church, and saw her in her mother-of-the-bride dress crying tears of both relief and sorrow. It wasn’t fair to Frankie of course, and it only took the first miscarriage to realize that.
We’d only been married a couple of months when I got pregnant the first time. But just a week or so after Dr. O’Malley confirmed the pregnancy, I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, bleeding so heavily I thought I might be dying. Frankie had held me and whispered, feverish in his reassurances, “We’ll try again. It’s okay. We’ll keep trying.”
And we did. Three more pregnancies, each one lasting just a few weeks longer than the first, making the agony of each loss successively more painful. Frankie mourned those lost babies intensely, insisting on giving them each a name: Rosa, Maria, Antonia, convinced they were all girls, though it had been too early to tell. At Sunday mass, he lit a candle for each one, whispered prayers with his eyes shut tightly, hands clenched together. And though he never said so, and would never have placed blame on me, I blamed myself. Blamed my body for failing him, for failing those little girls.
Not long afterward, Frankie arranged for the adoption of Francesca, and he offered her to me like a gift. He was what I imagined the perfect father to be, coddling and cuddling and spoiling her with his affections. My own father had been a shadow in my childhood: up before dawn, working until dusk, arriving at the dinner table exhausted and starving. His interest in us was no different than his interest in his cattle, except that unlike his prized heifer, we could offer nothing useful in return. Frankie, on the other hand, loved being a father. He lived to make Chessy happy, singing her songs and tickling her belly, proudly showing pictures of her to anyone willing to peer into the depths of his cracked leather wallet. And when Francesca was two, I could see that hungry look in his eye, that now-familiar desperation. “She needs a sister,” he’d said. “Every girl does.” And so we adopted Mary, our little Mouse, and we were finally a family. Frankie was content with his girls, his ladies as he called them. And I was careful, making sure there would be no more pregnancies, and no more miscarriages.
But then that June of 1960, the June when Mrs. Macadam died in her sleep, I knew (from the tender swell of my breasts, from the familiar twinge—that death knell I knew so well) that I was pregnant yet again and that this baby, like all the others, would soon be nothing but a whispered prayed, a lit candle, a name without a face.
However, outside Mrs. Macadam’s house, the lilacs bloomed and then fell to the ground, collecting in wilting violet heaps. Spring departed and summer came and, still, the baby held on. One month passed and then two, and I knew that soon it would be hard to keep the pregnancy a secret from Frank. I’d become an expert at turning him away in the bedroom, at feigning sleep. Headaches. My monthly visitor. But soon I’d have no choice but to capitulate, and he would notice the changes in my body. His fingers would remember; his hands would know.
It was terrible, but I wished that it would just happen already, knowing that after two months, while a pregnancy might be hidden, a miscarriage would not be so easy to conceal. The pain would be too much. I wouldn’t be able to manage this on my own. The last one I’d had was at almost three months, and I had never felt anything so horrific in my life. I’d felt possessed by the pain, as if it were something alive, something living inside of me. I couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t happening.
Mornings were the hardest. From the stringent smells of aftershave and sweet bacon to the cloying scent of Frankie’s Chesterfield cigarettes and the pungent Maxwell House coffee he drank, my poor stomach could barely take the assault. The very thought of baking a coffee cake for the new neighbors, of the brown sugar and cinnamon, made my stomach roil, but I knew it was what was expected, and it would also give me an excuse to go introduce myself. Like Mouse, I was wildly curious.
An hour later, after I finally managed to get the sink to drain, I pulled the hot coffee cake from the oven, burning my finger on the electric filament. I stuck my finger in my mouth and tried to suck the sting out. I seemed to burn myself every time I used the oven, and I often felt as though I were at war with the appliances in our kitchen, like they had some personal vendetta against me.
Frankie had gone into the city to work. Francesca was pouting in her room. (Francesca, who did not like change of any kind, was skeptical of this new family that had moved in across the street, and she had refused to go over and play with Mouse.) I imagined her sitting on her bed, chin resting on her bent knees, a dog-eared copy of The Secret River or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in her hands. This might have been the only similarity we shared; when the going got tough, we both retreated into our books.
“Chessy!” I hollered from the foot of the stairs. “We’re going over to meet the new neighbors.” I had learned early on that the way to get what I wanted from Francesca was to simply demand it. There were no
negotiations between us, only declaratives. And her adherence, while reluctant, almost always followed.
“Coming,” she grumbled, and came to the top of the stairs, making clear in her heavy steps and slumped shoulders that this was one change she would resist. She had loved Mrs. Macadam, who gave her dusty mints and stale, store-bought cookies and let her pick flowers from her flowerbeds. Francesca had taken her death the hardest, asking too many questions about heaven and God. Questions Frankie took in stride but ones I avoided answering. God and I had a difficult relationship, to put things kindly.
We walked across the street together, the coffee cake so hot it burned my already-wounded hand even through the dishrag I’d used to protect it. The smell that rose up to my nostrils made my stomach quiver and my neck break out in a cold sweat, despite the summer heat.
Mouse and the youngest daughter of the new family, a little girl with black hair and pale, pale skin who looked to be roughly Mouse’s age, were playing in the driveway. “Hi, Mama,” Mouse said, while jumping rope, her face scrunched tightly in concentration. Her hair was curly and red like mine, as though she were really my own. I could almost imagine sometimes that she was one of those lost babies, as though she had resided inside of me instead of some other woman’s womb. The other little girl looked bored, scraping at the cracked pavement with a stick, and didn’t acknowledge me or Francesca as we made our way up the rickety steps of the front porch, which was covered in unopened packing boxes.
I reached for the knocker and rapped it gently against the wooden door. Francesca instinctively straightened her skirt, one of the same plaid skirts she wore to school every day during the school year: her unsanctioned uniform, regardless of the season.
“Coming!” A woman’s voice came from inside. When she opened the door, she was breathless.
What I remember now was how striking her face was. I hadn’t noticed as I peered across the street from inside my house; I’d been too busy taking in the entire family to dwell on anyone in particular. But hers was the kind of face that grew more startling and remarkable the closer you got to it, as though her features sharpened in direct relation to your distance from them: like an impressionist painting in reverse.
“Can I help you?” she asked. And her face came into sharp and exquisite focus. Framed by smooth, dark hair, a widow’s peak at the top of her high forehead, her face was small, childlike. Dark brows, like wide brushstrokes, sat above her large, brown eyes, which were heavy lidded and long-lashed, like Mouse’s baby doll’s eyes: the ones that really opened and closed. Flawless skin; small, heart-shaped mouth with plump lips; and a jaw that was somehow both square and soft at the same time. Even swollen with child, she was stunning: the kind of woman Frankie might call a “knockout.”
“Hi,” I said, feeling suddenly even more coarse and unrefined than I usually felt. The humidity brought out the worst in my already-frizzy hair. If my hands had been free, I would have patted at it self-consciously. “I’m Billie. Billie Valentine. From across the street.” I smiled as she came out onto the porch and noticed, possibly for the first time, that there was a child not her own in her yard.
“Oh!” she said, her big, dark eyes opening, her whole face opening.
“We brought a coffee cake,” I said. “My mother’s recipe.” I still had difficulty taking credit for my own cooking. When things actually turned out well in the kitchen, I knew there were larger forces than my own skill at work: mainly my mother’s carefully handwritten recipe cards she’d made for me as part of my unofficial trousseau.
“How thoughtful!” she said, clapping her hands together. “I’m Eva. Eva Wilson. Come in, come in.” She took the coffee cake from me and gestured for Chessy and me to enter the house.
Inside, it was dark and cool. There were boxes everywhere and a half-dozen fans humming and stirring the still air. The furniture was pushed together in the center of the room. I’d never actually been inside this house before, or any of the houses on our street; I’d only stood in the doorways with the girls as they sold Girl Scout cookies or solicited donations for their school.
“So sorry, we haven’t put a thing away yet,” Eva said.
“Oh, please, don’t apologize. We probably should have waited to come over. Given you some time to settle in.”
“It may take forever if this heat keeps up. I move one box and I’m drenched in sweat. Is it always this hot here in the summertime?” she asked, fanning herself futilely with her hand. Her neck glistened with sweat. “I feel like I might combust.”
“Not always,” I said. “July and August can be hot though. It’s the humidity that makes it so miserable. Just wait until January; you’ll be missing summer.”
Winter here was a beast. I’d noticed California plates on the Cadillac. Clearly, they had a big surprise coming for them.
The other girl I’d seen earlier, the tall one with dirty-blond hair and a long, horselike face, came down the stairs. Eva smiled and motioned for her to join us. “Donna, this is Mrs. Valentine from across the street and her daughter . . . ?”
“Francesca,” I offered when Chessy only stared at the floor.
Donna looked Francesca up and down appraisingly and said, “Let’s go to my room. I have a Barbie doll.”
Francesca looked at me as if waiting for my permission, and I nodded. “Go!” I said. “Have fun.”
They disappeared upstairs and I followed the nauseating scent of my mother’s coffee cake into Mrs. Macadam’s kitchen. The little boy was nowhere in sight.
The kitchen was bright: yellow walls, clean white floors and cabinets. There were boxes everywhere, including on the surface of the Formica table where another portable fan made its best attempt at fighting this ruthless heat.
“Please sit down,” she said, motioning to a free chair at the table. “Would you like some coffee?”
I shook my head.
“I probably couldn’t find the percolator anyway,” she said, sighing, and sat across from me at the table.
“So you’re from California?” I asked.
“San Francisco,” she said. “But then Teddy got the job offer at John Hancock. Ted, that’s my husband, he’s from here, grew up in Boston.”
“And you drove all the way from San Francisco?” I asked. “With three kids?”
Frankie and I hadn’t ever taken the kids farther than Vermont to Gussy and her Frank’s camp at Lake Gormlaith, where the girls and I spent the whole month of August every summer, and those four hours in the car were almost more than either Frankie or I could take. We gave up on driving after one trip when we had to pull over three times for Mouse to throw up. Most summers, the girls and I took the train and Frankie drove up every other weekend to visit.
“It was terrible,” she said, nodding. “And it took about twice as long as it should have because I had to stop every half hour to use the restroom. I’ve seen pretty much every gas station from San Francisco to Somerville.”
“When are you due?” I asked.
“The doctor says late August, but I’m hoping for tomorrow. Day after at the latest.” She laughed. “How about you? When are you due?”
Stunned, I caught my breath and found myself shaking my head in denial.
She looked at me, confused, and said, “You are pregnant, right?”
I wasn’t really pregnant. A real pregnancy meant a real baby. And there never would be a real baby. And I wasn’t even showing yet, never mind that the only two people in the entire world who knew about my condition were me and my doctor.
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked, feeling my throat grow thick. “I haven’t told anyone. Not even my husband.”
“I’ve got almost four of my own. I know what pregnant looks like,” she said.
My eyes must have widened like a crazy person’s.
“And you looked like you might vomit when you handed me that coffee cake,” she said, laughing. “I’d offer you a slice, but I have a feeling you’d say no. Am I right?”
&
nbsp; I nodded. I felt panicky. I had just come over to deliver a coffee cake, but suddenly I felt exposed. Vulnerable. Frankie could not find out about the baby. It would kill him. And here I’d told a perfect stranger. Why hadn’t I just denied it? This was none of her business. Suddenly, I just wanted to go home, to be back inside my own house where my private life was private. This was exactly why I usually kept my distance from my neighbors.
“I’m just a couple of months along.” I looked toward the kitchen doorway, mapping my escape. “I’ve had some . . . um . . . bad luck, I guess you’d say. I’m waiting before I get everyone’s hopes up.”
“Of course,” she said. “And I bet it’s a boy. That’s why you’re so sick. I threw up every single day until Johnny was born. Boys are like poison.”
I forced a smile and tried not to think about the poison inside of me. And then, upon hearing his name, Johnny materialized in the doorway, drawing his pistol from his holster and holding his mother at gunpoint. “Bam!” he screamed.
I felt like I might jump out of my skin; my heart pounded hard in my chest.
Eva’s face flushed. “Johnny Wilson, you’ve got five seconds to hand over that cap gun. One . . .” And with that, cowboy Johnny ran off, out the door to the backyard, where I could see him mount that massive rocking horse, yelling “Yee-haw!”
“I’m sorry, I really should go. I’ve got a load of laundry in,” I said.
“I’m glad you came over,” she said, the color still in her otherwise pale face. “I don’t know a single grown-up person in this town besides Teddy. I really could use a friend.”
I grimaced.
“And don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell anybody. Your secret’s safe with me.”
When I told Frankie about the visit with Eva Wilson, I carefully omitted our discussion about due dates and morning sickness and babies. “They have a little boy,” I said. “He’s a holy goddamned terror. And her husband works for John Hancock. Some sort of salesman, she says.”