“Mr. Vanderhoff!” I shout into his face. His oiled mustache has a smell of its own, a sweet sickly cedar smell. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
He yanks me down on him. “I know all right.”
I can feel his enlarged organ against my belly, and I’m sick to my stomach with fear. This man isn’t playing around, and he’s stronger than you’d think for his state of intoxication.
“Let me see those boobies little Gerald gets to play with.”
“Mr. Vanderhoff!” I shout again as he rips the buttons from my navy blue work blouse and gropes for my chemise. My milk is already leaking, and he squeezes my breast and licks his thick fingers. We struggle silently. What would a cry for help get me? There’s no one home. No one to hear. I bring my elbow down on his nose, and that makes him bellow.
“You damn tart. Who do you think you are?” Then he gets rough, grips me tighter with his legs while his hands keep ripping at my shirtfront. My arms are now pinned, so I use my only weapon. I spit in his face.
This time there’s no expletive, but his eyes darken. I can tell he doesn’t care about intercourse, doesn’t care about the cost to his reputation or his family, he intends to hurt me. He pulls up my skirt and rips down my bloomers, but instinctively I go for his man parts.
It wasn’t like I thought to do it. My brain stopped when he first grabbed my breast, but my knee slams into his testicles.
“You bitch!” he growls, the fight suddenly out of him. While he rolls back and forth with his legs drawn up, I pull up my bloomers and run down the hall. Sobbing, I grab the crying baby, who was awakened by the commotion, and lock the door so there’s no easy way for Mr. Vanderhoff to get in unless he crashes through panels like a rutting bull, and if he tries that, little Gerald will have to be my protector. Mr. Vanderhoff is a father, for God’s sake, not crazy enough to attack me in front of his son. I don’t think he is, anyway. Just in case, I take the baby with me into my small clothes closet and brace my feet against the door.
There are no words to my tears as I open my torn navy top for the baby. No need to unbutton. No buttons left. They popped off on the satin bed cover. As I pull out my breast, the ruby rings plops out of my chemise and falls into my lap.
“Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop,” I sing softly to quiet the baby, “when the wind blows, the cradle will rock.” Tears run down my face. I’m still afraid that Mr. Vanderhoff will find me, drag me out of the closet, and force himself into me.
It isn’t as if I’m a virgin. I was with Lawrence. I gave birth to his baby. If I don’t struggle too much, the rape itself might not be too physically painful, but there would still be injury, a wound that starts in the vagina and goes straight to the heart.
I slip the gem back onto my little finger. Now what? I can’t get back into the bedroom to return it, and I can’t stay in this home any longer. Seeing Mr. Vanderhoff every day at breakfast and dinner . . . I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. My fate is sealed. I must leave tonight.
But what about the baby? I wipe my wet face. My little baby . . .
Not my baby, I remind myself, swallowing hard. Not my baby at all, though he feels like mine and I’m the one who nurses him and cares for him . . . but no matter. Gerald is theirs, the cold Mrs. Vanderhoff and the randy Mr. Vanderhoff. Gerald is theirs. I look down at the chubby-cheeked five-month-old. He lets go of my nipple, milk dribbling down his chin, and gives me a grin that would melt Antarctica. For a moment I think of kidnapping him, but that would be folly. I’d be hunted down and imprisoned for life.
At dusk, hours later, my head resting on my rolled-up wool cloak, I wake, still lying with the baby on the floor of the closet, and hear voices, then the clip-clip-clip of Mrs. Vanderhoff’s hard high-heeled shoes coming down the hall. The door to her bedroom squeaks, and I freeze. Will she see on the bed the buttons that popped off my blouse? Should I try to tell her about Mr. Vanderhoff’s behavior? Would she believe me? What if she notices that the ruby ring is gone?
“What the hell do you mean, leaving me at the tea?” she starts out on her husband in a high, insistent voice. “Even Mrs. Palmer could see you were soused, and she’s half blind. I’ve never been so embarrassed . . .” Mr. Vanderhoff mumbles apologies. She yells some more.
I wait, but no one comes to my room. No one calls me to supper. No one asks for the baby.
At midnight, by the twelve chimes of the downstairs grandfather clock, I creep out of the closet, put the baby into his bassinet, and pack my few belongings. Then, in the still hours, while the rest of them sleep, I nurse baby Gerald one last time, wetting his golden hair with my tears, tuck him in, and slip down the back stairs with my old satchel.
Rain drips from the eaves as I stand on the back porch. I have forty dollars in my pocketbook, money I saved from my weekly stipend, the ruby ring sewn into the hem of my cloak, and nowhere to go nor a friend in the world.
15
The Midwife
“What’s wrong, honey? You in some kind of trouble?” whispers Colleen, the yellow-haired waitress at the café across from the train station in Pittsburgh. I know her name from the stitching on her white uniform dress.
Tired and scared, I took the first train out of Chicago, not caring where it went, sure that the coppers were after me. Up until that day, I’d never been more than fifty miles from Deerfield.
Next thing I know, I’m getting out of a cab in front of Mrs. Kelly’s house in Homestead. Colleen told me there was a midwife, a lady who delivered babies all over town, who might know of a job for a wet nurse. My milk is already leaking, and I tried to express it twice in the lavatory.
Embarrassed by my wrinkled attire and my sad, limp hair, I knock on her door.
“Yes?” It’s a tall, dark-haired woman with an aquiline nose, dressed in a flapper outfit and smoking a cigarette; not what I’d expected.
“I’m Lizbeth Snyder , a wet nurse from Kansas City, looking for work.” (Afraid of the coppers, I’d come up with the idea of Kansas just five minutes before.) “Colleen, the waitress at the café near Union Station, told me a midwife, Mrs. Kelly, lives here and could maybe help me find work.”
“Sophie! Get down here. There’s a girl with breast milk all over her front!”
The flapper turned out to be Nora. She talked like that, kind of brassy, but she’d grown up in Shadyside, in a Victorian mansion, and could speak properly when she wanted to.