It seems strange now that I couldn’t tell I was carrying, never even thought of it, but my mother had died before my first flow and no one had ever discussed the birds and the bees with me.
When I finally told Lawrence about my pregnancy, he was thrilled but apprehensive. His mother, an Episcopal minister’s daughter, and his father, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, were sure to disapprove. The money for his education came from a small stipend his grandmother had left him, and he depended on his parents for his room and board, but he had little cash. That’s why he worked part-time as a scene designer.
Finally we could wait no longer. We wanted to marry, and he had to inform his family. (It was easier for me. I had no one to explain things to, no one to judge me.) My beloved was on his way home to ask for their blessing when he was killed in that train wreck at Western Springs. I read about it in the Tribune over soft-boiled eggs and rye toast. The front-page article listed the sixteen dead, Lawrence Frederick Clayton near the top. I traced his name with one finger and then collapsed like a tree cut off at the base. Lawrence was gone, his mouth that had kissed me, his hands that had touched me, his mind that had loved me.
It was shock that brought on my labor, I’m sure of it, and then the bleeding and the terrible pain. The baby was too early; not that it would have mattered, even a full-term infant couldn’t have survived that kind of blood loss.
The professor and his grief-stricken wife never learned about me or their son’s child. If the baby had lived, maybe I would have searched for them, but when the blood poured out of my womb, erupted like a flash flood on the Des Plaines River, I knew all was lost.
Milkmaid
“I can’t bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.”
I wake in the little house on Wild Rose Road with tears wetting my pillow. That’s what the matron at Chicago Lying-in Dispensary told me. That’s what she said. “I can’t bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.” The chatter of the other women in the small hospital ward turned off like a spigot.
“Dead?” I feel myself shoot down a long dark cold tunnel. This was the baby I’d made with Lawrence, my lover who had died not one week before.
“Smelling salts!” the nurse yells.
When I come out of my faint, a cool cloth mats down my long hair and the nurse leans over me. Is she telling the truth? All I can remember is blood running out of me and the night ride in the horse-drawn ambulance down the brick streets.
But why would she lie? If she wants a baby, infants born out of wedlock are a dime a dozen. I should know. I had lived in the House of Mercy, just one of the scores of foundling and orphan asylums in Chicago.
The nurse scrapes a chair across the wooden floor and sits down beside me, but she isn’t interested in easing my grief. She’s a hawk eyeing her prey. I am just sixteen.
“Elizabeth, if you’ll join the staff as a wet nurse,” she puts on the pressure, “you won’t have to go to an orphanage or back on the streets. You’ll be given a bed in the room with the other wet nurses, and you’ll have plenty of food. We only take healthy and well-spoken young women. It’s a respectable profession . . . and,” she threatens, “if you don’t get the milk out, your breasts will crack and fester.”
My eyes fill. I had planned to breastfeed, as my poor deceased mother did and all sensible women do, but I have no baby to suckle, and let’s face it, no home or livelihood either. My friends from the Majestic don’t know where I am or what’s happened to me. After Lawrence died, I never went back to the theater . . . just couldn’t walk in there all pregnant and weeping.
Now here I am alone with milk dripping down my front and an offer of good food and shelter. It seems the easiest way. I put my hands on my breasts, already as hard as doorknobs. I thought there were no tears left, but the well of sorrow never runs dry.
There were three of us then, Wilma, Nola, and I. Wilma was twenty and had been a wet nurse the longest. When her milk dried up, to get more, she went out and got pregnant again, on purpose. After the birth, Dr. Shane took her unwanted baby home to his wife, who couldn’t have one.
The other wet nurse—she came after me—was Nola. The nurses found her on the steps of the hospital, shivering in the cold, breast milk frozen on her thin cloak, and the matron took her in eagerly. She’d delivered at home with a midwife, but her pa had taken her baby because Nola was only thirteen. Then he’d sold it.
When we weren’t needed for suckling, the three of us were assigned to housekeeping; none of the dirty jobs like emptying bedpans, just dusting and mopping, and we weren’t allowed in the rooms when patients had fevers either. That’s why we called each other milkmaids, because of our cleaning duties.
I wasn’t bitter. We laughed when we said it: Milkmaid . . . “Milkmaid” sounded nicer than “wet nurse.”
12
Advent
Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . with Bitsy gone, my only company is my dogs, Emma and Sasha; my calico cat, Buster; and Mrs. Kelly’s ornate black-and-gold mantel clock. Still no change in the weather, but on a trip to the barn the air smells like snow, a clean winter smell.
When Mrs. Kelly and I first moved here, I felt I’d been dropped into a foreign land, Greenland or maybe Madagascar; everything was so strange. I’d been cut adrift. And I was scared too. For the past twenty years I’d lived in the city. I was scared of snakes and bears and skunks. Scared of hoot owls and night noises. Scared of the dark and the huge sky, so lonely without humans around. It wasn’t so strange for Sophie; she’d grown up in Torrington, just forty miles away, had gone to nursing school there before moving to Pittsburgh, and had spent summers on the farm with her grandparents.
It was hard at first to get used to no indoor plumbing, electricity, or access to a telephone, but over the last few years I’ve adapted. The lack of machine noises soothes me. The yellow kerosene lamplight is restful. Even the outhouse isn’t so bad. It gets you outside, and there’s always something to see. Today four mallards came in from the north and landed in the yard. I ran inside to get cornmeal, but when I came back they were gone, heading south.
Around ten, just before bed when I go outside to be sure the barn is secure, I notice that a wind has come up, but still no snow. I lift my head, scanning the sky, as my father, the sailor, would do. Clouds scuttle past the moon, moving fast, blotting out stars. Later, when I get up to use the porcelain potty that I keep, on cold nights, behind the bedroom door, I stop at the window. A few lazy flakes float down like torn paper. “There’s the big storm MacIntosh warned me about!” I think.