After the Fog

  The white material was pristine from the top to an inch above the hem. That last inch offered testimony to her day. Red iron-ore dust from the blast furnace and yellowish dustings over the black soot told her Rose had been near the zinc mill.

  Rose bent over the sink, head drooped forward, hands clamped around the rounded sink edges.

  “Mum?” Magdalena said, and felt her lips quiver.

  Rose turned. Her expression looked pained then irritated. She straightened and squinted at Magdalena. “You look as though you rubbed your head all over your pillow. What the hell’s going on with the histrionics, parading around town when you should be in school? Commiserating with Ester about a career in sewing?”

  She wanted her mother to hold her. But, she was frozen.

  Rose turned her hands palm up, water dripping from her fingertips. “What’s so bad today Magdalena?”

  Magdalena shook her head. She knew Rose’s unspoken words. Nothing we have to deal with is as bad as what I’ve seen so toughen up.

  Magdalena leapt up and fell forward into her mother. She felt Rose absorb her weight and steady them both. Rose gripped Magdalena’s shoulders and pushed her away so she could see her face but Magdalena didn’t look at her mother. She sobbed mouth open at her mother’s shoulder.

  Rose surrendered to the hug and she rubbed Magdalena’s back. “It’s just a phase. You’ll get that scholarship and you’ll get your confidence back. That’s what’s wrong, right? Just a little insecurity? Those boys giving you a hard time for taking physics again? You’ll be so happy once the pressure is off and you’re in college.” Magdalena’s face stayed plowed into Rose’s body.

  Just say it, Magdalena thought. Just get the words out.

  “I don’t have time for—”

  Magdalena nearly gagged getting out the words. “I’m pregnant.”

  Rose stiffened and she stopped rubbing Magdalena’s back.

  Rose dislodged Magdalena from her body and tried to capture her gaze. “Now. What did you say?”

  “I’m so, so sorry, Mum.”

  Magdalena saw her mother’s face contort as she came to understand exactly what her daughter had said.

  “Who did this? Your father will snap the S.O.B’s. neck. If I don’t rip his arms off first. Who did this?”

  Rose pulled away from Magdalena. A flurry of comments and questions flew out of Rose’s mouth so fast Magdalena could not answer them. She clutched at her skirt; afraid if she let go she might keel over.

  Rose covered her mouth with both hands, speaking through her fingers. “We’ll put the boy in jail. I’ll kill him.”

  Magdalena straightened. Now was the time for her to claim she loved the boy she let inside her body, but not inside her heart. “I’ve been in love, well, for as long as I can remember…”

  Rose dropped her hands and bit her lip.

  “I’m seventeen, Mum. You treat Johnny like he’s a grown-up and me like a baby, and oh, I love him, I do. I know you will never speak to me again. I tried, I love—”

  Rose shook her head and spun the faucets on, doused her hands under the water. Magdalena watched Rose’s muscles contract and relax, scrubbing the Camay over her hands, up her forearms, under her arms, as though cleaning up after a long night of working in the mill, as though she were covered in the same filth that Magdalena felt inside.

  Rose scrubbed her face again. “I don’t know why you would say all this, why you would want to break my heart. You loved him for as long as you can remember?” Rose bent over the sink and splashed her face, choking on the suds that streamed into her mouth. She rested her forearms on the curved porcelain, water rushing down the drain.

  Magdalena breathed heavily, her thoughts muddled and tired. She’d worked so hard to make her mother’s dream come true, to aspire to something other than a mill-wife. And now, she was exactly what her mother hadn’t wanted.

  “Mum, please. You always wanted a bigger family, more children, but you couldn’t. So, I can. I will. I’ll have all the kids you wanted.”

  Water dripped from Rose’s face into the sink. “You’re doing this for me?”

  “Half the girls my age quit school already and will be married within two years. What does it matter if I get married now? What’s wrong with me being like everyone else?”

  Rose straightened and reached for a face towel. There was nothing there. “Dammit! That damn Sara Clara! Dammit, dammit.” Rose blasted past Magdalena. She followed her mother to her bedroom. Wanting forgiveness. Rose had never had a weak moment in her life, but she was sure Rose could forgive her. Rose was a lot of things, but heartless, she was not.

  Magdalena watched Rose dig through a clothesbasket at the end of her bed, searching for a towel. She tossed the contents of the basket until she reached the bottom, but no towels. She looked at the ceiling and collapsed to the floor, pulling the bedspread to her face.

  Magdalena had never seen her mother like this. It frightened her and Magdalena began to sob, unable to catch her breath in between wails. “Please, Mum, look at me.” Magdalena held her arms out to her mother.

  Rose shook her head and pulled the spread from the bed and over her balled up body, rocking back and forth.

  “Then yell at me,” Magdalena’s voice was thin. “Please say something, but don’t ignore me. I know it’s not what you wanted, that you lived a different life than me. I know you’ve never made a stupid decision in your life. I’m. So. So. Sorry.”

  Rose winced and stared at the floor, rocking.

  Magdalena dropped to her knees next to her mother. “I just wanted someone to hold me. Someone who paid attention, who loved me for the way I was at every moment.” Suddenly, the words seemed real to Magdalena. Had she been looking for something more?

  Magdalena reached out to her mother, her hand shaking more and more as her mother refused to take it. It looked as if Rose had vacated her body, as though someone else was speaking through her. A meek, mumbling person, who barely pushed her words above a whisper.

  “Your family wasn’t enough? I wasn’t good enough? The mother’s always at fault,” Rose said. Tears welled in her eyes but not like Magdalena imagined. Rose’s quiet tears frightened Magdalena more.

  “Mum, please, look at me.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like to need someone’s touch. None,” Rose said. “You’re a slut.”

  Magdalena cradled her hand against her stomach. “What did you say?”

  Rose hadn’t looked at Magdalena when she said the word, but there it was, branding Magdalena’s heart with shame and Rose’s lack of forgiveness.

  “You betrayed your family, your upbringing, your future, yourself. You will never be the same after this.”

  Magdalena’s throat constricted. She couldn’t swallow. Her mother despised her. She’d never in her life heard of a mother calling her own daughter a slut. Not for any reason.

  “You have no right to run off with some boy when you had this family. When you had me.” Rose rocked, arms locked around her legs, head buried in her knees.

  Magdalena shook her head. She couldn’t stand Rose’s reaction, the way she seemed to disengage, release Magdalena from her heart. Magdalena hadn’t meant to get pregnant, to do it at all. But it had felt so good to be loved that way. Magdalena finally stopped sobbing, paralyzed by her own fears. It was as if air was entering through her skin rather than her lungs. She stared down at her mother, balled up, fragile in her terrible meanness.

  Magdalena was so grateful for her father. He would make her feel better. He wasn’t afraid to hold her, tell her everything would be fine. Her mother was simply not capable. Magdalena ran out of the room, looking for her father, for someone, anyone, to tell her everything would be all right.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, a dazed Rose still sat beside the bed, nubby spread pulled up to her chin, her knees to her chest.

  She was livid at Magdalena’s betrayal, the accusation, noooo, the evidence of her bad mothering now spattered
over their lives like grease from a frying a pan and it wouldn’t easily be wiped away. Still, the anger toward Magdalena was nothing compared to the shame, the reason she couldn’t bring herself to look at Magdalena, to touch her, to comfort her.

  Curled there, barely drawing breath, it wasn’t her daughter whom she mentally flogged and hated to her core. It was her own pitiful self. It wasn’t a failure in Magdalena’s character that led to sex out of wedlock; it was a defect in Rose’s, her former sins. She’d thought she’d done such a good job of raising her children. Rose grasped her hair, pulling it from her scalp, not hard enough to pull it out, but to serve as a reminder that she deserved pain. It was her lot in life.

  Rose’s mind reeled from her past, and she found herself reliving the time when she was utterly alone. Her bed then was a spindly, canvas cot in a cold cinder block cellar. The slow pulse of a ceiling leak tracked the night minutes as though time itself were as hobbled as she. It was in that setting that Bennett, her first love, arrived on scene, the first man who looked at her and saw a person.

  His interest was all it took for her to disrobe, to remove her values and morals like an old coat. His attention dissolved her common sense, her ability to gauge a person’s motives. She wanted him touching her, on top of her, in her. She could not get him far enough, long enough inside her.

  Sex with Bennett had made her whole. He approached her body like fine marble, a museum sculpture he was permitted to touch. The awe in his eyes had made Rose think God was finally being good to her. Bennett explored every slope on her body; it was as though each part began its existence once he drew his strong hands over it. She finally felt herself—her existence had mattered to another living soul.

  Before and after sex, Bennett and Rose spun the web of their future; his mind met hers like God himself had promised them to each other. They marveled at the smallest details; that they shook their coats off with the same brusque irritation, that they strangely buttoned their shirts from the bottom up, that they…well, it didn’t matter what form stupidity took, it was that Rose had found joy and love and belonging and didn’t even recognize it as stupidity until it was too late. And, somehow she passed that on to her daughter.

  Rose pushed Magdalena from her mind and focused on Bennett, the first to show her love. At least what she thought was love. Until she knew he couldn’t love anything, let alone her. Still, decades later, the image of Bennett Fayhe was as strong as the fog that had hung around all day. His face above hers, his expression near climax, whispering he loved her, convincing her he would save her from her dismal world. She wouldn’t have to scrape for an ounce of affection or a moment of joy again. He was there bathing her in it.

  Rose had believed him, and in the relationship that had created their baby. Theresa. Rose had thought the strands of her past and present were sealed off from one another forever.

  Rose remembered Bennett’s promise to share the rest of his life with her, if she gave Theresa away so they could go to school and make something of themselves before they had a family. She watched Bennett from the window, as he left the hospital, his posture relaxed as he ducked into the taxi. She saw the relief on his face, the irritating shudder that told he was never coming back.

  Rose could still feel her hands on the ice-cold hospital window, a chill spreading from her palms through the rest of her, and the new, but intense sensation of love obliterating her. Somehow, Rose had passed her lapse of judgment from twenty years before, to Magdalena.

  And, as Rose could barely breathe; she felt other thoughts forming in her mind. She pushed back at the memories of sex that were born before Bennett. That ogre’s hands, the way she could see his hands on her, but she had trained her mind not to allow her heart or skin or soul to feel them. His words shifted through her mind. “You’re a whore, Rose, you are my sweet slut.”

  Those words like grenades, exploding with the shame she’d thought she buried long ago. She could not believe she said the word, slut, aloud earlier. And now, she had called Magdalena it.

  And Rose could not believe after a lifetime of forgetting what had brought on the single biggest mistake of her life, her past had returned and dashed down the halls of present time, reminding her of her irresponsibility from twenty years before, what others thought of her. What she knew to be the truth all along.

  Rose choked on her own phlegm. She imagined Magdalena in her bedroom, crying, sharing Rose’s tears of shame, as though they were co-conspirators in a murder, finally caught and sentenced to death in the same courtroom.

  Rose had been there for Magdalena, giving her the best their limited funds could buy, showing her a woman could have everything in life if she worked at it. Most of all she gave her the opportunity to be raised by a loving, ever-present family.

  The father of Magdalena’s baby was still unknown to Rose, but she knew she didn’t want to see the boy…wouldn’t be able to be in his presence without killing him…oh, my God, she’d have to marry the man. Or be sent away. To St. Mary’s in Sharpsburg? St. Paul’s in Oakland? Never. Mayview? Not after Rose had spent her pregnancy and part of her nursing experience there. Surely they’d have records and they’d see that not only that Rose was a morally lapsed teen, but she’d bred one, too.

  Rose wanted to comfort Magdalena, but she couldn’t move, her lingering anger making it impossible for her to rise to her feet and put her daughter ahead of herself. She deserves to be alone, she thought, the abrasive image shocking Rose. How could she think that, want that for her daughter? Slut! The word kept popping into Rose’s mind. She clenched her teeth; terrified she might scream it out!

  Rose heard the door push over the nappy carpet then back, clicking shut. She could smell Henry. How could Rose tell him about his daughter? How could she break his heart? He would kill Magdalena.

  Rose threw off the bedspread and reached under the bed, pretending to search for something. How could she explain her crying in a crumpled heap on the floor?

  “Dinner’s ready,” Henry said settling on the floor beside her.

  She foraged around the carpet for lint. Rose wiped her eyes, still peering under the bed. “It’s dusty, linty under here. Dusty,” Rose mumbled. She was not ready to put a stake in Henry’s heart. He was a kind man, but there was a difference between being kind and dealing with your young daughter getting pregnant. He was sensitive; it would be too much for him to handle. She couldn’t have the two of them falling apart.

  “Just cleaning this mess,” she said, steadying her voice.

  Henry grabbed her at the back of her neck, gently massaging the spot where a knot had formed, throbbing like a bruise. He knew her body well, though she never again allowed herself to become enamored with someone else’s affection for her.

  “I’m not hungry.” Rose shrugged.

  He rubbed circles around her back. “Well, I think you’ll have a hard time resisting this dinner. All your favorites. I even made chocolate cake.”

  Rose waved her hand over her shoulder, sucking back rising sobs. She couldn’t speak. She plucked more lint from the matted carpet fibers, punching each piece into the palm of her hand.

  Henry cupped his hand over hers, making her stop her useless work. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll make everything work out, we have a plan.”

  Rose froze. She must have misheard him. She narrowed her eyes at the lint in her hand.

  “I mean it. We’ll all be okay,” Henry said.

  “Of course we’re okay.” Rose shook her head. This couldn’t be right. Magdalena would not have told Henry something like this without asking Rose to be there to support her. Magdalena may have tried to see what Henry would think if she said she wanted to quit school. But, she would not have told him this. Henry was a loving father, but he was not, he was not Magdalena’s mother.

  “What are you talking about?” Rose’s thin voice was worn down with the sadness behind it.

  “She’s a tough girl. She can handle it.”

  Rose’s body tight
ened, her skin felt as though it were gripping the bones inside her, suffocating her. “You know?”

  Rose finally turned and looked Henry dead in the eye.

  Henry brushed Rose’s hair off her face. She shrugged his hand away.

  “Whatever we decide,” Henry said, “she’s strong. We raised a good daughter.”

  Rose stared at him, suddenly hit by the reality of what Henry had said. That he knew, and was calm. Clearly he’d processed this much longer than she had. But it was what he hadn’t said that hit her hard. The realization hit her. She’d ignored it for years as life trundled on productively and happily in the case of the children. She suddenly felt attacked by Henry, his relationship with Magdalena.

  “You mean, you raised a good daughter. I wasn’t home. I was working.”

  “She gets her strength from you,” Henry said.

  “Same difference. Being strong won’t erase this, Henry. This is so bad in so many ways that I can’t even think straight. Above all she’ll rot in hell like rancid meat. This is a serious matter of her soul, her…what the hell do you mean whatever we decide? What choice do we have? Her life is over.”

  “Well, she could marry the fella. Or not.”

  “What fella? She told you who that bastard is?” Rose pounded the floor with her fist. “She couldn’t find the words to fill me in on that one.”

  Henry spread his hands open and cocked his head.

  “What? I’m too hard on her? Well, not hard enough, apparently. It’s because I work? Because I feel the need to contribute to our community, to be a nurse. I wasn’t home enough, those old bitties across the way always say. This is my sin as much as hers. What man? Who did this?”

  Henry rubbed his mouth as he spoke some mumbled words.

  “What? Tony? Tucharoni? The fella next door?”

  Henry closed his eyes then met Rose’s gaze, a barely perceptible nod.

  Her face flamed. She covered it with her hands. “The son of a woman who can’t even bring her laundry in before it rains? That boy? That boy?”

  Henry took Rose’s hands from her face then leaned back on one elbow.