by Maxine Clair
How would she look to them? She hoped, for one thing, that the girlish look was gone, and that she finally looked like the woman she thought she had become, wiser for her failures. She had been careful to pack her suits, and she had started wearing her hair in a more dignified style. At least now she could tell them about the permanent job she was in line for, and about the apartment search so far. At least she had brought them decent presents—perfume and a manicure set for Vergie, for example.
When they drove up she expected to see an auntie or somebody looking out the big oval window of the front door, but the curtain was drawn. Then she saw Vergie at the upstairs window and waved. Vergie waved back. She went ahead of Gene, and when she got to the porch she heard Aunt Frances’s voice. Just as she started to knock. Aunt Frances snatched open the door and yelled, “Let me look at you, girl,” and she could hear Aunt Maude squawking from somewhere deep in the house, “Is that her?”
Aunt Frances pulled her inside. Those first few seconds, October took in the little changes—Aunt Frances’s hair more white than gray, frame more slight than stout, more balm than boom in her voice.
Then, as Aunt Maude shuffled her way to the front of the house, Vergie came down the stairs holding a brown little boy on her hip. He wore a tiny undershirt with snaps and a diaper. One glimpse and October told herself. It’s just the Baby. You just haven’t seen him for a long time. Her insides started to tilt. Things were going too fast.
She couldn’t help but see his pudgy little legs, little feet. Then he twisted around and his eyes flashed on her, gave her chill bumps. She had to look away. But then she had to look back to see his little cheeks, the little pearly teeth in his liquid mouth. Silk-perfect skin. Precious. It’s just the baby.
He ducked and clung to Vergie with his head on her breasts.
“Hi, October,” Vergie said, swaying him, not really looking at her. Vergie had a diaper slung over her shoulder. “Say hi to your auntie,” she said, bouncing him.
October couldn’t say hi. Couldn’t say anything that would cover the shock and confusion that were rushing her blood.
“He’s a big boy now,” Aunt Maude said.
All of a sudden he spread all five fingers and pointed his little hand, said something like “Ut?”
“No, baby, no hurt,” Vergie said, caressing away his hand. “He thinks your vitiligo hurts.”
October’s bones were fast turning into rubber, and she needed to lean somewhere.
“He’ll get used to you after a bit,” Aunt Frances said. “Looks like you’re pretty tired.”
October nodded, yes, she was. This is him. This is my son.
And Aunt Maude threw up her cane. “You see I’m walking with a cane nowadays, don’t you?”
October knew that they saw the shock on her, saw that she couldn’t even look at him, for falling apart. Aunt Maude.
“What happened?” she asked Aunt Maude.
Aunt Maude said something about falling down and her hip being out of joint. “I’m fine—just can’t take the steps like I used to,” she said.
Then everybody seemed to be waiting for everybody else to say something and Aunt Frances took up the challenge. “Come on, honey, and sit down. I’ll make us some tea. We moved Maudie’s bedroom down here, and you’ll be in with her. That’s a nice suitcase you’ve got there.”
Aunt Frances, Aunt Maude, Gene, Vergie—they were taking her coat, showing her the Christmas tree, going on about the train ride and all the food they’d cooked, and then ushering her into the dining room, sitting her down in the armchair at the head of the table.
October saw a look pass between Aunt Frances and Vergie, and without warning Vergie stepped over to October and plopped David down in her lap.
“Here,” she said. “Say hi to him before I put him to bed.” And she stepped back to watch her do it.
Something told her she’d be sorry if she held him. But it was too late. She could smell him. Vergie had perched him on her knees, and October held on to the trunk of his warm little body with both hands. A baby boy too precious for words.
He stuck his finger in his mouth and stared at her. For the first time in her life, she really looked at her son. Right into him. In that little minute that they sat like that, time turned around and ran the other way, erasing its tracks. October felt him in her blood, in her bones, felt him being her son. Like a reflex, as automatic as blinking, she hugged him and pressed her face to his. And she knew immediately that everything she had believed about her life up until then was about to unravel.
Here was her beautiful, precious child, and she had given him away.
Vergie then snatched him up off her lap like the treasure that he was, and for the first time, October felt him being taken away. She caressed his foot as it passed through her eager hand. She wanted right then to put on her coat and go on back where she came from, because she sure couldn’t stay in that house, or come there again.
How could she have given him away?
chapter 10
For Vergie, up until October came that Christmas, it had been easy. She had got herself and everyone else ready. And good thing Christmas came only once a year, or everybody would have had to go on bed rest.
Not only did Gene steam loose the wallpaper in every single room, scrape the walls smooth, and repaper them with a better grade and pattern, but he also sanded and varnished the floors. He couldn’t figure for what—just did it because Vergie was having a fit about Christmas.
This time Vergie didn’t care that October had a knack for picking fabrics; when she put her mind to it she, too, could mix and match like no tomorrow. New café curtains in the kitchen made it brighter, new drapes upstairs converted her and Gene’s plain room to poshy.
Starting on the day October had left for Kansas City, Vergie had announced her wishes for her baby. Simply turn the house upside down—David’s room upstairs with her and Gene, Aunt Maude’s room downstairs, on the closed-in side porch that had been October’s. Aunt Frances could stay upstairs if she wanted to, but it had quickly become clear that her room there was only for sleeping. If she could have, Vergie would have built a kitchen upstairs, too.
No, she told Gene, she didn’t want to move—just wanted her family to have its privacy. And yes, she guessed it would be all right to put a playpen downstairs so that David could remain at the center of life on Monroe Street.
Morning of Christmas Eve, the house smelled right. Turpentine fumes and the sour odor of flour paste had been chased by the aroma of cloves studded on a baking ham and nutmeg in sweet potato pies.
For Vergie, none of that held a candle to the smell of a real live baby. She had closed the door to the dining room and opened the oven door to keep the kitchen toasty. No bathtub in the world could compare with the kitchen sink for giving David his bath.
She took off his nightgown and sat him on a towel folded on the drain-board. Inch by inch, she inspected his brown little body for the white freckles that might link him to October. There were none. Dear God, may there never be one.
“In you go,” she said, and before she could get her naked little pickaninny baby into the dishpan-turned-bathtub, David kicked and splashed his delight all over her and the floor. No matter. That’s why they made mops.
Once she had him sitting, he squealed, and splashed with his hands, making bubbles and giggling, too tickled at his smart self. Nine little white teeth—four top front, four bottom front one stray on the bottom toward the back of his mouth—his smooth nose, those stark black eyes in his brown round face looking up at her did it.
“Hey, dumplin,” she said, and smack-kissed his drooling mouth. “Momma’s got a big surprise for you. You just wait.” She cupped water over him with her hands and soaped the washcloth. As she began washing his back and shoulders, he reached for the floating Ivory, too slippery to catch, and he st
arted to fret, reaching and crying “Unhhh, unhh.”
“Boy, look at you,” she said, laughing. “Auntie!”
Aunt Frances came running Aunt Maude came shuffling through the kitchen door, panic in their steps, fear in their faces.
“What—is he all right?”
“Watch!” Vergie said.
David, too, had stopped to see what all the ruckus was about, but when Vergie pushed the soap toward him and he tried to grasp it, and it again slid away from him, he fluttered and jerked his little legs and went to fretting—“unhh, unhh”—and reaching looking at Vergie.
“You little devil,” Aunt Frances said, “acting up already.” And she tapped the bar toward him and watched as he failed once again to catch it.
“Don’t tease him,” Aunt Maude said. “You’ll make him mean.”
“I wasn’t teasing him,” Aunt Frances said, and she held the bar of soap still in the water, within his reach.
Little fingers splayed, David grabbed at the big soft bar, couldn’t grasp it, and settled for tasting the matter on his fingers.
“No!” they all yelled, startling him to crying and he reached both arms out for Vergie.
In real contrition they aw-babyed him and rubbed and soothed his slick wetness in Vergie’s arms, she petting and kissing him.
Gene came into the kitchen. “The boy’s gonna be so rotten we won’t be able to stand him.” And he got in on the petting too, smoothed David’s tight curly cap. “What these women doin to you, huh?”
When his bath was over, Vergie baby-oiled and baby-powdered him, dressed him in his new corduroy jumper and soft-soled tie-ups, brushed his hair, and buried her face in the sweetness of his neck. Then she gave him the surprise of a homemade ice pop she had frozen overnight and let him slurp it until his chin and his jumper ran red.
Over the nine months there had been several crises, but the first stood out in her mind as a marker for how far they’d come.
One day—only a month or so after October had left them last spring—they had gotten worried. David wouldn’t take his afternoon bottle. Cried and fretted and divided the rest of Vergie’s evening into offer-and-soothe, anything to quiet him.
By that night, he had out-and-out wailed. Aunt Frances, a chief LPN at Ross County General, couldn’t find anything wrong. Yes, of course his pulse was racing—he was wailing. Maybe his temperature was up, but not more than a degree. No, he wasn’t wet or hungry, no diaper pins sticking him, no rash to itch. Vergie had rubbed his stomach, burped him twice. Aunt Frances had listened to his bowel sounds, worked his fingers and toes, arms and legs. No pain there that she could see. Mrs. Hopp from next door said they should give him warm lemonade with a little flaxseed, or boiled potato water, slippery elm.
By ten o’clock, weary from crying. David had finally dozed off in Vergie’s arms. The rocking chair worked to keep him dozing and Vergie’s back comfortable, and she was afraid to leave it, lest she wake him.
“You get some sleep,” Aunt Maude said. “Let me sit with him awhile.” But Vergie said no.
And sure enough, after only half an hour, David woke up crying his little eyes out. Against Aunt Frances’s wishes, from the beginning Gene had wanted to call the home nurse. Once baby David woke again in the same state, Gene didn’t hesitate. No answer, but he dialed again and again until the nurse’s sleepy voice said all right, she would come.
Near midnight, with her aunts and Gene standing guard, Vergie held her crying baby still on the kitchen table so that the nurse could examine him. Heart, lungs, legs, arms, eyes, ears, nose, throat.
“Oh,” the grayer-than-Aunt Frances nurse said, and chuckled a little. “I see, little fella.” She said to Vergie, “Take a look.”
David kicked and wailed as the nurse shifted the tongue depressor in his mouth and aimed her little flashlight. “See—right there.”
Vergie saw the slightest rise and redness along one ridge of David’s gums, and she certainly didn’t think it was funny.
“He’s got a renegade tooth coming in,” the nurse said. “Hurts, too. The front ones usually come in first, these come in later.”
She dug around in her black bag cautioning them to hold on to David. Vergie’s finger along David’s gums found the hard place, but she couldn’t kiss away the pain.
Gene whispered, “What do they do for this?” to Aunt Frances, and looked disappointed when she reminded him that she had only taken care of grown people.
The nurse handed Vergie a small bottle of what smelled like juniper tar, instructing her to rub a little on David’s gums every three hours until the tooth broke through, and suggested she also buy a rubber teething ring.
All of that for the first tooth.
And David had fallen once, too—rolled off the bed, no telling how, but after that, he slept in his crib or on a quilt on the floor, which he seemed to favor. Once he could sit up, he had the oddest way of navigating. Using one arm, he would lean to one side and push off against the floor, scooting his little bottom along toward wherever he thought he wanted to go. After the teething incident, Aunt Frances’s baby-care wisdom was suspect. Normal, the doctor said. And crawling backward? Normal too.
By his birthday on the tenth (October had sent a pop-up card) he had started pulling up on furniture. Vergie wondered what it would be like for October to see him take his first step.
Around noon on Christmas Eve, when flurries started, Gene told her he thought he ought to leave early, one or one-thirty. If October’s train got to Columbus on time, he didn’t want to make her wait didn’t want to be trying to get back to Chillicothe in the dark and snow. Columbus might be a stone’s throw away, but thirty miles could stretch to three hours if the weather turned bad. And off he went.
It was difficult to put herself in October’s place, but she sensed that once October had flown the coop and gotten out from under, she hadn’t bothered to look back. Vergie believed that October had been ducking Aunt Frances’s telephone calls; her sister’s face at the Thanksgiving table would have been nice. No show, though. October had called the Sunday before to say that four days was not enough to see family and travel, too. She wasn’t coming. And Vergie had heard Aunt Frances’s ultimatum.
“You’re coming here for Christmas,” Aunt Frances had told October. “Whatever you have to do to get here, we’re your family. You may not want to see us, but we need to see you.” And Aunt Frances had hung up. Vergie knew then that October would come for a week, show off her newfound whatever-it-was: job, clothes, friends. And then be gone. And that was fine.
Or there was the off chance that October had put David in some other part of her memory where he was just a fact, and seeing him might send her back to feeling sorry for herself. Or, October might go back to wishing: David was a boy now—she might see in him the man she had fallen for. Or she might wish other things, things that sat way too heavily in Vergie’s stomach. David was hers now. She needed to stop scaring herself.
Just after sundown, as Vergie looked out of the upstairs window at the tight snow cover, Gene’s old station wagon pulled up. Both car doors opened at the same time, and Vergie watched October get out stand on the sidewalk, and look up at the house. Remembering, Vergie thought, and she waved. October grinned and ran up the steps to the front porch.
“She’s here!” Aunt Frances called, and Vergie heard her snatch open the door and yell to October, “Let me look at you, girl!”, and heard Aunt Maude, too, shuffling her way to the front of the house, calling, “Is that her?”
It was time. She hoisted David—in his nightshirt and diaper—on her hip and started down the stairs. Halfway down she hesitated. October glanced up and right then it felt like everybody hushed and waited for Vergie to come on down to the bottom of the stairs.
“Hi, October,” Vergie said, and tried to get David to say hi, but he just stared.
Could see, too, that October was dressed to the nines in what had to be some kind of ten-piece outfit, with a two-piece suit and a cape number, a hat and an underblouse all the same color dark green, and brown alligator heels. Brown alligator pocketbook.
“Say hi to your auntie,” Vergie said to baby David.
David stuck his finger in his mouth, but he didn’t take his eyes off October.
“He’ll get used to you after a bit,” Aunt Frances said.
She saw October trying to look at him without looking at him, smiling at Aunt Maude and glimpsing baby David’s bare feet. Vergie wished she had kept him with his clothes on.
Aunt Maude showed off her cane. “What happened?” October said, about Aunt Maude’s cane.
Aunt Maude told her about her fall and her hip and they all stood in the vestibule waiting for Vergie didn’t know what, and suddenly baby David spread all five fingers and pointed to October’s white spot.
She bounced David on her hip a little and said to October, “He thinks your vitiligo hurts,” and was flabbergasted by sudden tears shining in October’s eyes.
Vergie stood there for what seemed long minutes bouncing David, Aunt Frances peeling October out of her coat, Aunt Maude admiring the shoes and purse, October trying to look without looking until Gene pushed open the front door and hauled in the suitcases.
“What you got in these things,” he asked, “—iron?” They all laughed as he struggled to drag the suitcases into the house. And they all moved to the living room like tomatoes on the same vine.
“What a beautiful tree,” October said. “New lights,” she said, looking around at the new wallpaper and shiny floors.