“Outside, there they were again: those two snooty doormen in those stupid-looking uniforms. I marched right up to them and told them to point me back toward the train station, and to make it snappy cuz I’d had a bellyful of New York City and couldn’t wait to get out of it. They went wide-eyed like they was scared of me and told me which way to go. But when I was just four or five steps away from them, I heard them funnin’ at my expense. ‘Maybe Daisy Mae could go back home and be Miss Dogpatch,’ one of ’em said. ‘Or Miss Cowshit,’ the other one chimed in. Oh, they was havin’ theirselves a grand ole time on me—until I marched myself right back to where they was. ‘Y’all can go to hell in a handbasket!’ I screamed. Then I fired my shoes at them, hard as I could. You shoulda seen them two, duckin’ like a coupla scared little girls.”
Verna says she managed to stay dry-eyed all the way back to New London, and on the bus back to Hewett City, too. It wasn’t until she reached her dreary little room in the hotel where Yancey had parked her that she gave herself permission to let loose. She cried so hard that she could hardly catch her breath. “The tears that come out of me coulda probably filled up a bucket,” she says.
FOURTEEN
The second man to follow Verna from the hotel bar up the back stairs to her room was Uncle Iggy, who, she said, was not like the first guy, Frank, or like Yancey either. He was more gentlemanly than both, and his lovemaking was patient and considerate—absent of the highs she’d felt with Yancey maybe, but at least he didn’t make her feel low and used like Frank had. And at least he had no plans to join the Merchant Marines, go off somewhere, and never even write her a letter.
After their second sexual encounter, Iggy mentioned casually that he was an “Eyetalian,” which surprised her. Her mother had warned her that “those people” were crude and low-class, just one rung up the ladder from the coloreds, if that. Ha! A lot she knew. Iggy was courting her. Giving her flowers and taking her places so that she knew their friendship wasn’t just about that. He took her dancing one night, and twice to the movies: Guilty Bystander the first time and The Asphalt Jungle the second. They weren’t the kind of pictures she liked, but she didn’t mind looking at Tyrone Power and Zachary Scott and, while Iggy sat there holding her hand and cupping her knee, imagining what those two would be like as lovers. Or Errol Flynn, whom she had seen in the flesh, which had been the only good thing that had happened in that otherwise miserable day in New York City—one of the worst days of her life.
One Saturday night, Iggy drove up to see her in the middle of a blizzard! Rather than cancel their date, he’d had chains put on the tires of his car—a roomy Hudson Commodore. “Just the kind of automobile my daddy’d been partial to.” They ate at the best restaurant in town, which wasn’t saying too much given that the town was Hewett City, but because of the snow, they were the only diners there and it was very romantic. Iggy ordered them both a fancy dish called lobster Newburg. It was delicious and, better still, came with Duchess potatoes “which had fancy swirls but was really just good ole mashed potatoes puttin’ on the dog. For dessert, we got slices of this fancy cake that had liquor poured onto it. Iggy fed mine to me. He was trying to be lovey-dovey, I guess, but I kinda felt like a two-year-old in a high chair. Between bites, I told him about how, where I come from, we had king cake at Mardi Gras, and how it had purple, green, and gold frosting and a little plastic baby hidden inside it. And how, whoever got the slice of king cake with the baby was gonna get a year of good luck. Iggy kinda snorted and said that getting a baby sounded like bad luck to him. And I said, ‘Well it’s only plastic. It’s not like you have to feed it and change its diaper.’ And he laughed and fed me another bite of that boozy cake.”
When they left the restaurant that night, they walked through the snow back to the hotel and had after-dinner drinks at the bar. By the time they got up to her room, Verna was feeling “drunk as a skunk and silly enough to tell him that I wudn’t Verna Hibbard anymore. I was Fanny Feathers. The more of my clothes I flung off, the sassier I felt, and when I was down to just my birthday suit, I told Iggy that now he had to striptease for me, and he was liquored up enough to do it, too! So I flopped back on the bed and watched the show. When he got down to just his undershorts, I said what everyone says when they want beads or other trinkets at the Mardi Gras parades: ‘Throw me something, mistuh!’ Iggy tried to drop his drawers, but they got all tangled up with his pecker, which was already jacked up and ready to go. We both broke into giggle fits. Then he got free of his shorts, jumped onto the bed, and the two of us went at it. I suspect that was the night that the baby got started.
“Iggy ended up sleeping over, which he never done before, and the next morning, after the snow in the street got plowed away and he left, I went over to the mirror and spoke sass to it like I was talkin’ to Lana Turner. I said, ‘Move over, blondie, because you ain’t the only gal that’s having an affair! And my boyfriend ain’t married to some poor crippled lady like yours was. He ain’t married to no one. He’s free as a bird.’ But then it occurred to me that I was married, which I had kinda forgot about. Then the sass drained right outa me.”
When Verna missed her period at the beginning of April, she started feeling “sick as a shaggy dog in an August heat wave.” She had lost her appetite and struggled even having to serve food to customers at Charlene’s. But when Iggy gave her a solid chocolate rabbit for Easter, eating it appealed to her and she devoured it, headfirst down to its haunches. Fifteen minutes later, she vomited it all back up. She told Iggy it was the grippe. When she missed her next period, she told him the truth.
She shook her head and cried when Iggy accused her of getting pregnant on purpose. Then she reminded him that he’d not bothered to put on a “safe” that night of the blizzard. He apologized to her but made it clear that he didn’t want a baby. To further complicate things, Verna received a cable from Yancey that he would be back in port the next month, and that he loved and missed her and was craving to be with her again. She agreed to have the abortion that Iggy said he would arrange, even though the thought of it made her sad and scared. She took the money Iggy gave her to pay the woman who would come to her room and perform the procedure. He offered to be there with her, but she told him no.
Verna had every intention of going through with it, getting it over with, but when the abortionist knocked and gave her the code word, Verna opened the door and lost her nerve. Facing her was the gruff, mannish lady clerk at the store where she bought her groceries. There were two cashiers at that place and Verna always went out of her way to avoid this woman because she was so mean-looking and unpleasant. When Verna told her she had changed her mind about the operation, the woman became angry and pushed her way into the room. She sat down on Verna’s bed and said she wasn’t leaving until she was paid what she’d been promised. To be rid of her, Verna got the envelope of bills Iggy had given her, shoved it at her, and told her the cash was payment for her silence.
In the hours that followed, Verna paced and wondered what would happen now that she had paid for an abortion she hadn’t gotten. She began to imagine that Iggy would come around and be understanding and sweet again. What did she care if he was “Eyetalian”? She had long since given up trying to please her mother. She would divorce Yancey quickly and quietly. Then she and Iggy would marry and get a nice little place, get all the things that a baby needed—a bassinet, a crib, a carriage. He would grow to love their child. She was pretty sure she loved Iggy, too, although differently than she loved Yancey. The baby would bind them together. “I begun to think that maybe the Good Lord Jesus had decided to forgive me after all. He worked in mysterious ways, didn’t He? Maybe He had sent that horrible woman to my room instead of someone more pleasanter just so I would decide not to rid myself of the life growing inside of me—Iggy’s and my little boy or little girl. It would all work out, I figgered. And maybe a grandbaby would even soften my mama’s heart, especially if the child didn’t look too dark-haired and dark-skinned and I could
keep it from her that it was half-Eyetalian.
“Iggy brought me get-better flowers that evening when he drove up from work to see how I was doing. I meant to admit the truth from the git-go but, instead, I heard myself lying—telling him that I was tired and sore from the p’cedure but that I’d feel better after I got some rest. I got confused at first when he changed the subject and started talking about some secretary he knew from work, and how she’d been having marriage troubles and would be getting a divorce. What in the world did that have to do with me? Then, suddenly, it came to me like a punch in the head: he had taken up with that secretary and was throwing me over. I threw his flowers back at him and told him to get out of my room and go to hell. The anger was what came first, the tears later. I watched out my window as, down below, he got in that big old Hudson of his and drove away. He had no inkling that I was still carrying his child. Maybe I coulda gotten him back if he knew, but now I didn’t even want the big dope. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I thought, which was somethin’ Mama always used to say when she was mad at someone.”
Luckily, Verna was hardly showing by the time Yancey returned from his travels, talking a blue streak about all the places he’d been to, all the things he had seen. Silence had nearly driven her insane in the first months she’d lived in this room, but now she wished she had a little of it back again. “It was like these talking walls was closing in on me from all four sides.” Yancey was not only more boring than she’d remembered, but he was less handsome, too. He had bought her souvenirs at every port of call: mostly dolls in native costumes—saris, sarongs, “the kind of clothes Dorothy Lamour wore in those dumb ole Road pictures with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.” He’d bought Verna a life-size silk kimono as well. It was headache-red and egg-yolk orange and had angry-looking dragons embroidered on the front. She wore the kimono as a bathrobe, even though, for some reason, it made her feel cheap and trashy to slip it on. She stood the dolls up on the windowsill like they were contestants in a beauty pageant and took Yancey’s naïve ribbing about the little potbelly she’d developed in his absence. That observation caused her to abandon the idea that she might pass off the child as his. She blamed her frequent nausea on a stomachache that just wouldn’t quit her. When Yancey suggested he take her to see a doctor, she panicked. She wanted no part of doctors! Luckily, she was able to talk her way out of it. She still enjoyed sex with Yancey, but not as much as before now that she had some basis for comparison. She seemed to want tenderness more than wildness now. Sometimes when he was moving urgently inside her, she was reminded of the ugly encounter she’d had with Frank. When Yancey attempted to pleasure her down there with his tongue, she found herself missing the way Iggy did it and wished her husband wasn’t lapping at her like a thirsty dog. Waiting for the slurping to be over, she looked at those dolls on the windowsill. Instead of beauty contestants waiting for the judges’ decision, now they looked to her like women in a police lineup. By all rights, she should be standing in that lineup, too. After all, she was the guilty one. Was she that good at deception or was Yancey what he had once accused her of being: dumb as a retarded mule? Whatever the reason, he couldn’t seem to read any of the signs that he had a faithless wife.
Yancey shipped out again three weeks later. It was a good thing, too, because now she was beginning to show in earnest. She could feel some fluttering in her tummy. Car coats, long sweaters, and loosely tied waitress aprons helped Verna hide her condition for a while longer. She saw Iggy once during this time, after he’d had a spat with his new girlfriend—that secretary he had dumped her for. Verna wasn’t about to let him inside her room, so they talked outside in his parked car. He said he thought about her all the time, even when he was with his new floozy. She knew what he was going after with that kind of talk. Without having to disrobe or even take off her car coat, she managed to satisfy him with her hand. He drove away with his pants undone and his goop on his shirttails. “Better there than inside of me, I figger. I’m fed up with men and their stupid needs. The only thing I care about is the child who’s gonna come outa me and who I’m gonna love and protect.”
At work, Charlene guessed that she was pregnant but not that she was carrying the child of a man other than her husband. Verna had no game plan. She had seen no doctor. She got no advice from the mother who had disowned her and continued to hang up in her ear. She had no girlfriends in this unfriendly town—no young mothers of babies she could consult. Her own baby’s kicking made her nervous. Was it normal that it should be so restless in there? Would it come out normal or strange like that pinhead girl she’d seen at the carnival Granny Shoop had taken her to when she was little? “That poor thing’s mother must have been full of sin to grow a child like that one in her belly,” Granny had said. Every once in a while since that long-ago day, when Verna thought about the pinhead girl, she had prayed for her. “But that was back then, before I lost the right to pray for anyone, least of all myself.”
Charlene gave Verna a baby shower on her last day of work. The morning and afternoon waitresses, Margie and Linda, had left gifts but said they couldn’t come back for the farewell. So it was only Charlene and her daughter-in-law, Edith, who attended. The gifts Verna opened—receiving blankets, rattles—suddenly made the baby more of a reality than all those months of kicking had. “And that made me good and scared. But I had wrote down the date when I started missing ‘my friend’ and figgered I had another whole month to make a plan. Maybe I could go see some nice minister and ask for help—or even that old priest with the bushy eyebrows who showed up at Charlene’s for supper like clockwork whenever the special was shepherd’s pie.” Her mother would be horrified at that idea. She’d warned Verna not to trust “Catlicks” in general, priests and nuns specifically. They were as shifty as Gypsies, she told Verna, and would sweet-talk their prey until they’d gotten the conversion they were after. Then they’d show their true colors once you were owned by the pope. The more Verna thought about it, the more she figured she would avoid the clergy altogether. She could put the baby in her wicker laundry basket, tuck blankets around her, and carry her to an orphanage. Ring the bell and run. Yes, that’s what she would do. She was relieved that she finally had a plan.
Her water broke at around one the next morning. Either the baby was coming early or Verna had miscalculated. For a while, she lay there on the warm, wet mattress, shivering but otherwise immobile. Then the contractions came. Frightened by the pain, and by what was happening, she was nevertheless grateful that the baby would arrive while the rest of the hotel’s second-floor lodgers were asleep. She got up, paced the room, and endured another two hours’ worth of the baby’s fight to come out. When she convinced herself that it was time to push—that she would either push the child out of her or else die from the pain—she walked down the hallway holding onto the walls as she went. Reaching the bathroom, she entered a stall and locked it, sat herself down on the toilet, and stuck her fist in her mouth to stop herself from screaming out in pain. She began to push with all of her might.
Verna stops her testimony there. Lois thanks her and the two begin to fade. “Wait! Don’t go yet! Verna, I need to tell you something.”
“Remember the rules, Felix,” Lois’s ghost says. “She has been here to give testimony, not to converse with a member of the living world.”
Ignoring her, I look directly at Frances’s mother’s ghost. “Thank you! Thank you for my sister! Thank you!”
In Verna’s fading image, I’m pretty sure I catch a grateful, quivery-lipped smile.
FIFTEEN
That day at the Institute of Living? When Simone and I were asked to go to the waiting room and I cried, finally having realized that Frances’s anorexia might kill her? Simone had sat down beside me, drawn me to her, and promised that our sister was going to be all right. I guess that’s the difference between faith and doubt. When I twisted the knobs of that Etch A Sketch as we waited for the others to emerge, a jumble of nothingness had appeared on the screen. But Simone
told me that, one time when she had played with an Etch A Sketch, a linear Blessed Virgin Mary had presented herself to her. “Frances is going to get better and be okay,” Simone promised me that day. “You’ll see.”
She was right. Guided by Dr. Darda, Frances brought herself back to a healthy weight and learned how to release much of the anger and fear that had thwarted her and driven her worst behavior. In the months following her hospital stay, by degrees, she underwent the process by which she forgave my parents their well-intentioned but misguided deception about her origins. As Pop had pointed out to her during that therapy session, she was, after all, still a Funicello. Maybe that was why she forgave him first. Forgiving Ma took longer, forgiving herself longer still.
Frances’s grades had never suffered during her illness and she graduated from high school with high honors and a full scholarship to Boston College. After vacillating about whether to pursue a career in medicine or law, she settled on BC’s pre-dental program. She became friends with a pre-veterinary student, a freckle-faced redhead named Molly Nickerson. Molly and Fran were dorm mates first, then roommates. Boston was a comfortable fit for them both, so in their senior year each applied to Tufts for graduate work, and each was accepted in her chosen field. “Molly’s school is in Grafton and mine’s in Chinatown, so it only makes sense that we get a place in between. We’ve found a pretty nice apartment in Framingham.”