“He didn’t mean to do it, Alice. He didn’t mean to harm the baby. He meant only to stop the crying. He was a kind and loving father to the girls. It was after David came that he seemed to be less tolerant. I thought he was under stress with his work and travel. Thought he was tired. But then I realized he was still patient with the girls. It was only David’s crying he could not tolerate. I had seen him shake the baby, yelling even, to hush him. I would take David from him and soothe his crying in another room. He did not mean to harm him, Alice. That much I know of him. Of that much I am certain.”
Alice raised her head. Could she be so certain Howard had not meant to kill their son? He had been trying to get the fever down. The baby crying, thrashing in the water, struggling so fitfully. Howard trying to cool that fever with cold water in a porcelain sink, while she lay sick in the other room. Trying to stop his crying. It was Howard who had cried when the baby stopped breathing, when she snatched the lifeless baby from his trembling hands. Howard choking, mumbling, “Don’t, Daddy. Please, please, Daddy, don’t.”
“I think some deep fear of his father—and of himself—somehow overwhelmed him.” Constance’s voice shook.
Now Alice was overwhelmed. Her mind, her heart could barely hold so much, barely know where truth might hide itself.
“He wasn’t a bad man, Alice. Just a very lost one. Lost from the beginning. I see that now. Now, when it’s too late, I see how lost he was.”
Constance sat straight, her shoulders heaving, and stared out the window.
“Now you know me, Alice. How lost I may be, too. Now you know the truth of what I am.”
Yes, this dear, kind, generous, competent woman, this widow who had carried in her all this time the guilt of a murderer. Alice curled her feet beneath her and slid them over the side of the bed. Now was not the time for even more dire revelation. Perhaps there might never be a time for more. Here was more truth than most lives could hold. Here was trust she could not betray. The quiet in the room felt as if it had physical weight to it. She stood in front of Constance and reached out to take her hands; lifting them toward her heart, its pounding quieted.
“No, not what you are, Constance. But who you are. Come here.”
Alice pulled Constance to her feet and put her arms around her.
“Who you are is a treasure to me, Constance. You are indeed more than a friend to me. You have become the sister I have never had. You and I are more closely knit than either of us could have known. We share more than we could have imagined. How did life conspire to bring us together?”
Alice held firmly to this strong woman, and as she did, she knew she was also holding herself. Holding a new strength of which she had not believed herself capable.
CHAPTER 51
Baby Samuel was born at four o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday in May. The birth was not easy; the contractions extended far beyond her first labor. A midwife had been brought in to assist Martin with the birth, a small dark woman whose very presence filled the room with comfort, her knowing hands here, then there, adjusting, tilting, raising Alice from the bed to walk, to squat, to breathe. Her face close to Alice with more than instruction—“Breathe now, breathe now. Slow, slow. Now pant shallow, shallow”—breathing with her, panting shallow with her, then slowing, breathing deep between contractions. Martin seemed to turn over charge of the labor to this woman. Because Alice sensed through the pain how he trusted her, Alice trusted her, as well.
Between contractions, he teased her. “You’re taking your time, young lady,” he said. “Looks like you just want to keep that baby close inside you. You can’t just keep that baby to yourself.”
She felt his gentle hands holding the area between the small of her back and her abdomen with a steady pressure.
“You want this baby born?”
Want this baby born? More than life itself. This baby was everything for her. She was fighting to bring this baby into life. This was her entirety, her only purpose now to bring this soul to life.
“Good thing you’re at home for this,” he said.
Yes, at home, she thought. Yes.
In another hour, she felt contractions hard and fast, demanding her to push. More unbearably relentless than before. One so sharp she could feel only a narrow point of darkness, a tiny piercing point of light at the center, an escape into nothingness.
And then Martin said, “Ah, here’s the head. Push now. Push.”
Push she did and felt the pressure ease, the pain slip away.
“Well, Alice, this little boy wants his mama,” Martin said. He lay the warm, wet, white, mucus-covered body on her belly as the midwife delivered the afterbirth, cut and tied the cord.
The warmth of that tiny body on her skin overwhelmed Alice with a love she had experienced only with Jonathan. This living reality laid across her belly filled her with light, lifted and expanded her very being. She laid her hands over the slippery little back.
Analee stepped forward and took the infant up in a towel to clean him.
Alice reached up reflexively.
“I’m giving this boy right back to his mama,” Analee said. “Don’t you fret now, Miss Alice. Just gone get him cleaned up a little bit. Get a diaper on him for you.”
Alice watched in awe while Analee went about her ministrations, as if she’d done this all her life. Maybe she had. Beside her, the midwife worked her expert hands into the process, stood beside Analee as she laid him gently into Alice’s outstretched arms. She gazed in amazement at his blinking eyes, his sweet baby lips making faint sucking sounds, one tiny hand free of the swaddling waving toward her face. For this moment she had fled Chicago, fled the cold and the treacherous ice and snow. For this moment she had created one magnificent gown of silk and mysterious private symbols. For this moment she had found herself and him a home, unusual as it might be, where he would be the unknown brother to his two half sisters.
“Expect that boy will be spoiled to death in this house full of females!” Martin laughed. “What more could a man hope for? Let’s call those girls in here to meet this boy child in their midst.”
*
As the days passed into weeks and the summer heat began to envelop them, Constance and Analee fussed over Samuel—when Alice would relinquish him—changing, powdering, fanning, bathing, cuddling. The girls were ecstatic when one day it was decided they might hold him in their laps, with assistance from one of the women.
“Well, now, ain’t that something?” Analee said. “Could be your baby brother. Look at that, Miss Constance. Look like that boy only got the wrong hair. Straight and brown, ’stead of curly and blond. Right near to being a brother.”
Right near is right, thought Alice. She had recognized the resemblance, the eyes and cheeks, the mouth that bore evidence of a shared fatherhood. She had wondered if she imagined this, if anyone else might notice.
“Yes,” she said. “He seems to have my brothers’ hair.”
CHAPTER 52
Martin Birdsong continued to make regular late afternoon visits, sometimes with the excuse of checking on Constance, sometimes Alice and the baby, sometimes just with news about the success of efforts toward funding the workroom for the girls from the orphanage. On occasion Dorothea would join them.
Their plans became refined and moved toward the complex details: how girls would qualify to work there; how the jobs would be detailed for charges and payment; how much, if any, of the sewing would be done for the orphanage itself or if all of it would come from community commissions, with orphanage work remaining in house with less experienced girls.
Dorothea had put out a plea among the women she knew—there was quite an array and number—for any used machines and had managed so far to have six donations, half of which were practically new and were donated by women who had decided, after a brief try, that sewing was not among their passions. The remaining three machines needed only minor repair, and essentially for related reasons. Something had gone wrong with a machine as a woman attempted to learn to use it, and she had deemed the endeavor too frustrating.