She looked petrified; she was a girl, only, big nosed and pale and fresh from the convent. She believed in God; she believed God was an old-fashioned man Who surely would turn His head away from childbirth. What would she need? She wiped the knife on her skirt and put it in her apron pocket in case. “Yes,” she said, “yes, but where did you come from?”
He pointed toward heaven, but he took her through the house. The sky outside was darkening. The blue hour; l’heure bleu; but all hours are blue. “Follow me,” he said to the hired girl. “This may be tricky, but we will have gravity to aid us.”
Bertha’s legs were still there, though she was naked from the waist down.
“Mother of God!” said Margaret Vanetten. “Shall I get the lard?”
Bertha was part of the house, the house was part of her, they were a mythical domestic creature. The structure had fastened around her like an exoskeleton. That was what happened when you had a baby, she told herself. (She was almost certainly going to have a baby.) You became part of the house.
She felt her body a floor beneath her but near the ceiling. She could hear the voices below, too, humiliating, then not humiliating. She understood she might never feel mortified again. Then everything shifted, and it was as though the house were wringing out her torso: a tremendous unfastening fart, and her legs and feet were soaking, and she scuttled scrapingly up into the belvedere.
“Oh,” said Margaret Vanetten, “oh, oh, don’t worry, Doctor, we will get this settled.”
The two of them went up the stairs and found her there, on the floor, stroking her own hair off her forehead, a comfort, a tic. She’d got up but there was no way to get her out except in two pieces. The pipe smoked, cupped safe in the ashtray.
“All right, Bertha,” Leviticus said. He had found his doctor self, the one that was bored by childbirth, too. “Nothing to worry about.”
“If all goes right,” she said. She wore a white smock hitched up around her hips.
“Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.”
“Not only,” said Bertha darkly.
If all goes right, she said again and again. Every third time the words were flattened with fear. A bog was a woman; a woman was a bog.
Margaret Vanetten the hired girl thought she herself might die of fright. She had never seen so much in her life, so much fluid and woman and marriage. It smelled of spilled whiskey up here. Something sterilized, surely. Then she thought: I will know this baby her whole life, I will love her more than anything or anybody. (She was certain it was a girl.) If we live through this—by we she meant only the baby and herself—I will love the child perfectly. “Don’t be scared,” she said.
Bertha said, “But I am,” and Margaret Vanetten hugged her, and was flung away with such fury she skidded across the floor to the baseboards. “Don’t touch me!” Bertha Truitt commanded.
“Onions,” whispered Margaret unhappily, smelling her own fingers. “Yes, ma’am.”
In the belvedere Bertha Truitt hollered. It sounded to her like somebody hollering in the other room. Quiet that woman. I am trying to die. Her old self rolled around the boards of her brain; she couldn’t get at it; she had a sense it was about to drop off the edge.
She was dying. Her soul was leaving her body. A soul was leaving her body. A body was leaving her body and it didn’t want to. A person.
Who was it, this person?
She thought, If the worst occurs I will leave. I will walk out of the house and into the city. Another thing she didn’t have in common with her husband. He would have disappeared into the countryside.
She loved Leviticus but she’d left things she loved behind before.
Things could go wrong. She knew that well. The sky around the belvedere had turned nacreous: pink, weak gold, blue in the hollow of clouds. “Go get a lamp,” said Dr. Sprague to the hired girl. The house had electricity but the belvedere didn’t. The air smelled of salt and disaster. Bertha found herself thinking of Joe Wear. Why on earth? He was capable and unsentimental, unlike Leviticus, unlike the hired girl. He would solve this problem. Also he had survived his own birth, evidence you could escape utter calamity. He’d told Bertha his survival had been a question: “I was blue, they said. Cord round my neck. So that’s why.”
The Salford Devil was only a woman, birthing or grieving, alone or plagued by company.
She was a creature with two heads, half woman, half infant. “That’s good!” said Leviticus, as though she had said something. Then woman and baby were just two naked people in one room, same as the other two gaping, bloody, entirely clothed people. No, thought Bertha Truitt, you weren’t anybody’s mother till you looked that person in the face, and she waited, she waited, and then she thought, ah yes, the child was dead, the death was like hearing someone reading a bad-news telegram in the other room, and wailing, though the wailing was hers: she should have known not to count on any kind of luck in matters of love, so she said, “Leviticus,” and “Ah!” he said, “Bertha,” and handed her an object, it was a baby, a live one, beating like her heart, thatched top, broad shouldered as a bread box, “Our Minna.”
They had agreed to name a girl baby Minna. She could no longer remember why.
1907, February 22, Washington’s birthday. The date cannot be argued with: her birth was recorded at City Hall.
The Darling
The babies Margaret Vanetten had previously known had been such little dear dumb animals, but from her earliest hours Minna was peculiarly human. She had a look to her that communicated everything, and Margaret understood. There’s her hunger cry. There’s the wet. Hold her head, Miz Truitt, she doesn’t have the muscles to do it herself, she’s just a little loaf of ham.
Margaret had originally been unsure about working in the strange house for the strange couple—was it natural, their marriage? was it right?—but Minna was the answer, a blessing, an amendment, an agreement, and also, as it happened, Margaret Vanetten’s purpose in life.
“Those curls’ll fall out,” Margaret had told Bertha, because she’d heard that was what happened. You admired a newborn baby for her hair and then it dropped out and both of you were disappointed. But Minna’s hair stuck.
Rosy and squinched Minna, milky sweet, with her smell that sent Margaret swooning—though the scent turned out to be a particular brand of detergent that Dr. Sprague had shipped to him from Canada in the same box as his whiskey. “Nothing in America like it,” said Dr. Sprague, who wrote love poems to his girl: Daughter, you are little, waking
In the slant light of late morning.
I am here to meet my sweetheart:
Glint-eyed, round-faced, dimpled darling.
Who knows, baby, if you hear our
Prayers for you, our dreamy dreams?
Every hour we tell the hour
By the sun’s unlikely beams
Through our windows: you’re our sundial.
You’re the measure of our days.
Your ears are flowers, I whisper in them,
Your eyes as green as chrysoprase.
Minna, mine, remember this if
Babes remember things they hear.
My heart, eight-sided, every angle:
Is my Minna’s. She’s my dear.
(The poem was in Minna’s desk when she died, written in the sort of cirrocumulus penmanship that sets you to dreaming no matter the words.) Bertha Truitt was a mother, a loving one, but perplexed. Minna in her mother’s arms looked up. Anybody has seen it, a baby reading a face, careful as a phrenologist: that round chin means you’re my mother, that wide forehead means you’re my mother, that ear close to your head, those green eyes! What a scientist Minna was. What inventions and conclusions. She had the advantage. She had known Bertha’s literal depths, had elbowed her organs and heard the racket of her various systems. She had measured time by her mother’s diet and respiration, her exercise, and then Minna was born into the wide world and Bertha was so behind in knowledge she would never catch up.
So every morning she went to her place of business, to remember who she was. Of course she brought the baby.
“I’ll come along,” said Margaret.
“The laundry wants you,” Bertha Truitt told Margaret, as though the laundry were a man at last asking for her hand in marriage, “and the alley wants us.”