Angie gave me a sweater she had knitted herself. It was the color of the ocean at night, and there was a single pearly button at the neck. "It's going to be too small for you now," she said. "But I thought, hey, you're not going to be pregnant forever."
"When did you do this?" I held the sweater up over my stomach. It was beautiful, as fine and stylish as a green cocktail hat.
"I worked on it while you were asleep, or in the kitchen. A couple of times I was knitting on it right in front of you and you never even noticed."
From the ladies of Saint Vincent de Paul I got a hardbound copy of The French Chef Cookbook, which I was happy to have.
June came over for Christmas Eve dinner. She came into the kitchen, stamping the slush off her boots. I had invited her. I knew there were plenty of people who liked June, but 1 wasn't sure that any of them asked her to Christmas Eve dinner. The little family she had left was far away now. I had told her I would come over and get her, but she said no, the walk would do her good.
"Merry Christmas, girls," she said to Sister Evangeline and me.
We wished her a Merry Christmas. I had never seen June at Saint Elizabeth's. "When was the last time you were here?" I asked her. I was thinking a couple of months. Maybe it had just been last week and I had missed her.
"Not since they took the old nuns away," she said, hanging her coat up on a hook by the door.
"That's more than thirty years," I said.
"That isn't so, June," Sister Evangeline said. "You came over when Sister Mary Joseph and I first came. You brought us a pie. Don't you remember that?"
June nodded. "Maybe I did," she said. She looked around the kitchen, let her eyes wander over every pot and pan hanging against the walls.
"It's still pretty much the same," she said. "The refrigerator, that's new."
"Stoves, too," Sister said. "Bunch of the burners died out on us in 1955."
It didn't make any sense to me. We were so close. We were literally in her own back yard. "Why don't you come over?" I said.
June picked up a cookie, looked at it, and set it back on its plate. She shrugged. "I never came here. I did when they were building it, and then maybe a couple of times after that. Opening parties, you know. We weren't so welcome here, the Clatterbucks."
"But you're welcome here now," I said.
"Old habits are hard to break." She laughed a little. "That's what we used to call the old folks in town when I was growing up. Old Habits. Guess I'm an old Habit now. I'll tell you, though, I used to go to the edge of the woods at five o'clock and watch the folks come out and have their drinks on the porch. This is way back, when it was the Hotel Louisa. I used to think that they would all be sick people come to drink from the spring and there they'd be, all decked out like a fashion magazine. High-heeled shoes, suit jackets. Healthiest-looking group of sick people I'd ever seen. I guess it kind of burned me. I just stayed away."
"Well, you're back now," Sister Evangeline said, tossing the whole thing off. "Rose and Son. They brought you back."
***
It was Son who gave me the biggest surprise of all that Christmas. After dinner he came into the kitchen and slipped an envelope on the counter. It was tied with a green ribbon. "What's this?" I asked him.
"Open it up."
It was a drawing of a chair, a little pencil drawing of a straight-backed chair. It was good, really. The chair just floated on the paper without benefit of room or floor. The drawing was careful and clean. On the back it said, "Merry Christmas to Rose, from your friend, Son. 1968."
"This is nice," I said, feeling surprised and a little bad because I hadn't gotten anything for him.
"It's your chair," he said, looking away from me. "It's back at my house. I figured you could get it before you go, if you have room in the car and all. I didn't want to bring it over now. You know, that would look pretty stupid, me walking in here with a chair."
"You made me a chair?"
He nodded.
"This chair?"
"It's not a big deal or anything. I make a lot of chairs, tables, stuff like that."
I turned the card over and read the back again, then I looked at the drawing. "I'd like to see it."
"Sure," he said, "any time you want. I have it for you."
"I'd like to see it now," I said.
"Ah," he said. "It's Christmas Eve, maybe you best stay here. Y'all be doing stuff tonight."
I went back into the pantry and put on the heavy sweater I kept on a hook near the flour. "I want to see it now," I said.
We headed out into the darkness, into the light snow. Silently we went across the field to his little house, where I had seen him sitting alone. I could tell that he was limping more than he usually did. I wondered if the cold weather bothered his leg, and I wanted to ask what had happened to him, but I imagined that it was none of my business. I felt nervous somehow, almost like I was going to the house of a man I didn't know alone at night, and not to Son's house to see a chair. I folded my hands across my stomach. I was six weeks away from delivery, and there could be no doubt that he was not bringing me out to his house to kiss me, to tell me I was beautiful. I was not beautiful.
We wiped our feet carefully before going inside. It was like a doll's house. The little living room I had seen with a table right in the middle of everything, then three rooms in front of us, a kitchen, a bath, a bedroom. All the doors were open. Everything was neat and put away, almost as if he had been expecting someone to come. There was a painting of a horse over the couch, one of the leftovers from the days of the Hotel Louisa, I assumed, and the curtains seemed washed and pressed. It was careful like the drawing, everything just in its place, so if he was to leave quickly it would seem like no one had been there at all. It was too small for him. He made the furniture into miniatures just by standing beside it. He'd had to bow his head to come through the door of his own home.
"There," he said, and pointed to the chair next to the sofa. "That one's yours."
I would have known it. It was the chair in the picture. It was sturdy and graceful, made of a dark wood. There was a needlepoint cushion on the seat that tied onto the back of the chair.
"Miss June made that for you. She told me not to tell you she did it, but I didn't want you to think I did it."
I went over and sat in the chair. It was comfortable. It was the right height.
"Get up for a second," he said. I stood up and he grasped the chair by the leg and turned it over like a book of matches. Under the seat, in the exact same writing, were the words "Merry Christmas to Rose, from your friend, Son. 1968." He had carved it there. "That way you'll always know it's your chair."
I thanked him and touched the letters with the tip of my finger.
That night I thought more about the chair than anything else. It was like coming back into the world, owning a real thing. There was a time I had chairs. Chairs and lamps and a mattress and box spring, plates and books and records. All of that was gone now. Until that night I had owned nothing that would make me think I could one day have a home again. And now I owned a chair. And it had my name on the bottom, proof that, no matter what, it would still be mine.
It was three days after Christmas and everything seemed stale. The tree would stay up until New Year's Day, as would the decorations, but Christmas was over and we wanted it behind us. We ate turkey sandwiches and turkey soup and a turkey potpie. We were trapped inside the house with Christmas leftovers. There had been a heavy snow on December 26, and even short walks were difficult. The sisters discouraged us from going out at all, telling us how we could fall, how other girls had fallen, what had happened. As ambivalent as I had been throughout my pregnancy, I now had a sense of coming into the closing stretch. I had made it this far and the idea of something happening to me now kept me inside, watching my step. From the kitchen window I could see my car, wrapped in a white blanket of snow. It was as if it had gone to sleep for the winter.
Angie came into the kitchen just after lunch. S
he was due the week before I was. It was impossible to believe that her baby was going to die, the way it kicked and grew. She was so fine-boned and small that the pregnancy seemed bigger on her than on me, as if what she had was not so much a part of her, but merely stuck on.
"Come on, Rose," she said, "I need to talk to you."
"Then talk," I said. I was tearing up lettuce into a plastic waste can, the only thing I could find big enough to mix so much salad.
"I want to talk to you upstairs," she said.
Sister Evangeline and I both looked at her. Her fists were clenched, her face full of rage. "You go on now, Rose," Sister Evangeline said. "I'll finish here."
I dried my hands and went to Angie, but before we were out the door, Sister Evangeline called to us. "I know about these things," she said. "My mother knew. I'd like it better if it could happen another way, but you call me if you need me."
Angie stopped dead and looked at her.
"Go on," Sister Evangeline said. "I was just telling you."
Angie pulled me up the stairs by my wrist. "It's Beatrice," she whispered harshly.
"What do you mean, it's Beatrice?" But I knew.
"She's having the baby here. She says she's going to do it."
It was all I could do to keep myself from lunging for her. "You said she wouldn't. You said nobody did."
"Well, I was wrong, okay? I can't talk her out of it. There's not a damn thing I can do but: do what she wants."
"We could go tell Mother Corinne," I said. "That would stop it."
"You just do that."
"Look, I don't want to, but this isn't a game. We have to do what's best for her."
"She's all grown up," Angie said. "She's made her own choice about what's best for her."
We got to her door and stood for another second in the hall. I held her hand. "Did you read that book?" I asked.
She nodded and we went inside without knocking.
Beatrice was sitting on her bed, her feet stretched out in front of her, reading a detective magazine. Regina was sitting beside her quietly, watching.
"Hiya," Beatrice said.
We came inside and closed the door.
"Tell her not to do this," Regina said.
"Don't do this, Bea," I said.
"Well, you tried. I've got to give you that much." Beatrice flicked through the pages of her magazine. "'Dead Girl Found Strangled in Pool of Blood That Is Not Her Own.' That's the one I've been saving as a distraction, for when things get bad."
"When will that be?" Angie asked, sitting down on the opposite bed. Beatrice and Regina had one of the nicest rooms in the hotel. The honeymoon suite. It had a window seat with a beautiful view of the pasture and a separate sitting room. I wondered if the honeymoon suite had always had twin beds or if they'd moved those in later.
"Hard to say," Beatrice said, "I haven't done this before. I had the first one this morning around six o'clock, forty-five minutes apart. Now they're twenty minutes."
"Twenty-two," Regina said, holding up her wristwatch.
"Twenty-two, whatever. My water just broke a little while ago, though, that's why I called y'all. It could be sooner or later, either way."
Beatrice had her black hair up in a ponytail right on the top of her head, so that it made a black fountain down the sides of her sweaty face. She didn't have her socks on, and her feet were so swollen that her toes seemed to run together.
"This is so much better, being here," she said. "My own bed, all of you. I'd say you all ought to do it this way, too, but they'll crack down after I make it. It'll be a lot harder to do. They don't expect it now, they're not—" Then all of a sudden she stopped and closed her eyes. Angie, Regina and I held our breath. Beatrice took Regina's hand and squeezed it so hard you could tell it hurt. Her face contorted with a pain so pure it made me want to cry out. It lasted too long, it seemed to go on forever.
"Seventeen minutes. That was only seventeen minutes from the last time." Regina was paler than Beatrice, her own light brown hair slicked back with sweat.
Beatrice exhaled and smiled. She was a little bit shaken, you could see it, but mostly she was proud. "See there, I can do this. I told you I could do this." She laughed. "Hurts like a son of a bitch, ladies. I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you, this is pain. They say you forget all about it, though, once you've got the baby."
That made me think that the four of us would never forget then, that we would have to carry that pain around with us forever because there would be no reward for our labor.
"Stop staring at me," Beatrice said. "Y'all are acting like I'm some kind of sideshow. This is gonna be you here in not so very long."
"It is not going to be me here," Angie said. "I'm going to be in the hospital, like any civilized person."
"Suit yourself," Beatrice said. "But you drop me a note when your time comes and tell me that you didn't want to ride all the way to Owensboro in an ambulance holding your baby."
I turned away from them, toward the window, looking for comfort and finding snow.
Beatrice went back to her magazine and the three of us sat there, waiting. Finally she shut it. "Look," she said, "it's not that I don't appreciate this and all, but you're making me nervous as a cat here. Go do something. I'll call you when I need you."
"We can't just leave you here," Angie said.
"Get," she said.
So we left. I went back to the kitchen and Angie went to polish silver. Only Regina stayed on, because it was her room, too. It would have been beyond her to leave Beatrice, anyway.
"How's she doing?" Sister Evangeline said.
"Who?" I knew she knew, but I just didn't want to get into it with her. She was a sister, after all, and I didn't want to incriminate her in any way.
"All right," she said, peeling an apple, "be that way."
I couldn't settle down. I would try to read from the cookbook, but then I'd put it down and head back up the stairs. I caught Beatrice in the middle of one, panting like a dog. Regina had a wild look about her, her eyes were big and round, her shirt was soaked through.
"Wow," Beatrice said, settling back.
"That was eighteen minutes, but the one before that was thirteen. It doesn't stay exactly the same."
"Why do you keep looking at that damn watch, anyway?" Beatrice said. She was getting tired, you could tell.
"I have to have something to do," Regina said.
All afternoon I tried to think about Beatrice, but I kept thinking about myself. That was where I was headed, the panting and pain of it. Like Christ in the olive garden, I prayed for deliverance. I wanted the birth to pass over me.
At six o'clock everyone came down to dinner, including Regina and Beatrice. I couldn't believe it, but there she was, her face not nearly as pale, her hair brushed neatly. "I fixed her up," Angie whispered to me as we walked in. "I think she looks pretty good. It took nearly all the blush I had, but she's got some color in her."
"Why are you here?" I said to Beatrice.
She smiled weakly. "If I skip dinner they'll know something's wrong. They're watching me pretty close, you know."
So we sat at the table and took turns eating off of Beatrice's plate, though none of us was hungry. Sister Bernadette came by and put her hand on Beatrice's shoulder. "How are we doing tonight?" she said.
"Fine," Beatrice said. "I'm a little tired. I stayed up all night reading."
"No signs yet?"
"Not yet," she said. "I don't know how much longer this kid thinks he can hold out."
Sister Bernadette laughed and patted her arm. Then she wandered off to the other tables, checking, asking.
I was impressed by the fluency with which Beatrice lied. She was no beginner. I suddenly wanted to hear her story, know just what had happened to her in that mine where she worked with the men, but it hardly seemed the right time to ask. I wanted all of this to be over, and yet I knew that once it was she would be gone and I would never see her again.
It seemed clear th
at everyone knew exactly what was going on except the nuns. The other girls looked at our table, nodded when they caught our eye. They were telling us they understood and would be ready to help when the time came. A light currency connected us. We were all in the same boat. We knew.
When her first contraction came at dinner we laughed and she put her hands over her face as if she were embarrassed. I could see the veins rising in her arms, her shoulders trembling, and then it passed. Her blush was streaked with sweat, and Angie leaned over to wipe her cheek with her napkin.
Beatrice stayed all the way through dessert. She had another contraction just as the plates were being set down. But she was not even the first to leave the dining room. When she did go, she went slowly, stopping to talk to people while Regina stayed close at her side.
"You'd think we were staging some kind of prison break," I whispered to Angie. "This is ridiculous."
I went back into the kitchen and Son ate his dinner while I cleaned up. When the serving platter slipped from my hands, he was there before it hit the floor. He caught it in one giant hand and laid it on the sink. "Sit down," he said, taking my shoulders and guiding me over to the chair. "You don't look very good."
"I don't feel so well, I guess." Sister Evangeline wasn't around. She had taken to drifting off somewhere after dinner.
"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll clean up and you can sit and talk to me for a change."
"You've worked all day," I said, but made no move to get up. Son reached down and picked up my feet in his hands and set them lightly on the chair in front of me. There was something so familiar about the gesture that it made me shudder.
"You want to tell me what's wrong," he said, starting in on the dishes.
"This," I said, and pointed to my stomach. "It wears me out."
His face flushed and he turned away from me. "Then you shouldn't be working yourself so hard. You chase the other girls off, take it all on yourself. You've got to think about what's going to happen when you're gone. Sister's gonna need a new girl and now I don't know but what she won't be able to stand it. You've been with her all the time."