“We will see.”
LuEtta wondered whether Bertha Truitt would be overtaken by ordinary life. She wondered what she herself would do, if Bertha Truitt disappeared into motherhood. People were careful around her when they spoke of babies, but other people’s babies never made her miss Edith more. Edith was an organ that existed inside LuEtta, far away from all womanly organs, tucked up in her rib cage. For a while after Edith died LuEtta had wanted another child very keenly—Edith the Organ worried for her mother, had suffused LuEtta with that desire. Quick! Before this is the story of your whole life! Another child! But then Edith the Organ simmered down, and was herself.
LuEtta wasn’t sure whether Truitt knew about Edith. She’d assumed so these years, assumed that Truitt’s extra affection for her—everyone saw it—was sympathy for the loss of Edith. It was pragmatic Bertha who allowed LuEtta to think—just some early mornings, just some lunchtimes—that one day she might leave Moses Mood. Walk away, on to the next life. The presents Bertha gave: a wooden toy brought back from somebody’s trip to Germany with two bears who took turns chopping at a log when you pulled a string; blouses made up specially, with coppery trim that matched LuEtta’s eyes. Truitt’s love for LuEtta lit up Moses Mood’s lack of it. His regard was for tools: hammer, wrench, awl, plane, rasp, angle, gun. A wife was a tool for the production of children, and LuEtta Mood was faulty. She would not leave him but she could believe she would.
Truitt liked to name things without naming them. The game. The place. The bog. The place in the bog. The bog and the boglands. The gentleman. The ladies. The baby. The bowler. The ball. The wood: you must learn to read the wood. The world: the world stops for the game. The place. The city; the Commonwealth. The old pinbody. The dead. The afterlife. The time. The death of me. The almighty, the very death, the bitter end.
They had been two childless women together. I had a baby who died, thought LuEtta, but she knew that the moment to tell Truitt had passed, if Truitt didn’t know.
There was no name for Edith but Edith.
When Bertha’s time had nearly come, Leviticus performed the Leopold Maneuvers, his hands on Bertha’s stomach. “Who’s Leopold?” asked Bertha. “Ssh,” said Leviticus. They were in their bedroom. She wasn’t aware of how much more of the bed she took up but she was clear about how much more of the world, and it was terrible. He was ascertaining how the—not child, she insisted, not baby, she didn’t want a word that suggested the future in any way. Well, not visitor, said Leviticus, not guest, nothing that suggested transience. They settled on stranger, which seemed equally wrongheaded to both of them. The Leopold Maneuvers were a way to ascertain certain things about the stranger: direction, presentation.
Bertha lay back on the bed. She would have liked to discuss the peculiarities of a woman’s body with LuEtta. Impatience with husbands. Pregnancy, its terrors and pleasures. Bladders, blood. Women told these truths to each other. Bertha knew they did, but she had never told anyone and nobody had ever told her and she didn’t know how to start. Leviticus’s hands, cool and dry, were on her skin at the top of her abdomen. An intimate distance. He nodded, worked his way down. His left hand cupped the right side of her immensity, then he reached up and took her hand and laid it in the same spot. She could feel a heaviness, a curve that was not her but beyond her. “The stranger’s spine,” Leviticus said in a fond voice.
No, she thought, let us not. She didn’t hate certainty, she didn’t hate mystery, but she couldn’t bear the mongrel state between the two, knowing only some things—the stranger’s head was pointed downward!—but not everything—who? Who? Even to call the event the stranger—as soon as she got used to it, she hated it. Leviticus’s hands worked their way down. He was not really touching her but it still hurt. He pinched. She jumped. He’d covered her feet with the old quilt and she felt staked as a circus animal. The living being inside of her was an idea she’d had, her own dear idea, grown round and meddling. He tilted his face to the ceiling. In other examinations he had struck and sounded her, but now he just palpated, looking for shape instead of echo. His hands never left her body.
“Like head reading,” she said.
“Nothing like,” said Leviticus.
“Who are you examining?”
“You,” he whispered to her immensity. In English it could be plural or singular. English was a fine language for prevarication.
Later that afternoon, Bertha Truitt thought, I am heaving with child. Child, she thought again experimentally, the entity that ordinarily tried to kick and shoulder Bertha out of the way, though Bertha was all around. Now she could feel no movement, only a lightning pain that was her body and not what her body contained.
The pain sent her to the spiral staircase to the belvedere, where Dr. Sprague had gone to smoke a pipe. A disaster is coming. Get yourself high up. The baby, too. The baby? Yes, she was starting to believe it. She wanted to see her husband’s reassuring face. The iron stairs were narrow and she had never liked them. Her frame did not bend. It marched, it bowled, but it did not bend. Even at the best of times if she dropped something she would not stoop to pick it up. Her bosom sometimes had to be moved around a tight corner like a chifforobe through a doorway.
She assessed the staircase with fury and then thought, Dominate it, Bertha, give it no quarter.
She went right up, paused only a moment, victory, to rest her breasts upon the floor of the belvedere, and took one more step, and stopped.
“Leviticus,” she said, “I’m caught.”
He was there reading a book. He put it on the little green table by his fringed armchair and regarded her.
All her life her widest part had been her bustline, which she used, as a cat uses its whiskers, to gauge where she might fit. No longer.
Oh, Bertha: wedged in the aperture of a belvedere.
She hollered, a wild noise, and Dr. Sprague understood why she’d chanced the staircase. By her expression he could tell that she was now a different person, as all women are in the act of childbirth. That is the great change, Dr. Sprague knew, not the baby, who is the same object on either side of the experience. One hopes the same object: alive and mothered. Here in childbirth Bertha was somebody who would say—she was saying now, I will stay here forever if I must, get away from me, get away from me, leave me alone.
He never was intended to deliver this child. That job belonged to Hazel Forest, who was bored by childbirth, and the hired girl, Margaret Vanetten, who was now in the kitchen. Dr. Sprague was too softhearted.
“Turn, I think, to the right,” he said to her. “Perhaps—”
“Hazel!” she said, and also, “get the hired girl!”
He couldn’t shout down the stairs at a white woman who wasn’t his wife, hired girl or no. He would have to retrieve her in person. He went out the window, down the ribbed raked octagonal roof. Had he dropped his pipe inside? Had he remembered to douse the match? He almost went back in: he was terrified of fire. No time. Late winter, ice and snow. His insides leapt but he kept his feet careful down the exterior stairs of the octagon. The wet seeped through his leather slippers. Then he burst through the back door into the kitchen, where Margaret Vanetten was weeping with onion-cutting for supper.
“Margaret,” he said. “My wife. If you wouldn’t mind. The time has come.”