All Betty will ever say of my infancy is this: “You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.” When she says this—and she does not admit it often—she looks ashamed, as if she should have known how to quiet me. She tells me how she would give me to my father, who would rest me on his big warm stomach and cradle me in his hands. “Your father could always calm you down. Or I’d give you to Mammy. Mammy could always calm you down. I never could. I could never make you stop crying.” She doesn’t believe she ever got it right.
Several years ago, my mother, my aunt Alice, and I went to Springfield, Illinois, where my parents lived when they were first married. We went by the apartment house where they started out, and I asked if she had been sorry to leave, to go back to Madison, where my father began working at the lumberyard. “Mammy needed us,” she said. “My father was dead. She needed help. Harry needed help, though he wouldn’t admit it. I liked Springfield. We had made some friends. I was young and kind of pretty. There were places to go there, a group of nice young couples, a pretty lake.”
After our drive, we went to visit our cousin Dick, who lives in a nearby suburb and whose daughter, Kim, a midwife, was visiting from California. Kim has a child, Macao, maybe a year or so old then, young enough that he was still likely to stumble a bit when he walked. Macao had long, shiny black hair, and sweet fat legs, and chubby hands. He was, as they say, a beautiful child. When Kim, holding him, offered him to Mother—the woman who always avoids babies—she said, “He doesn’t want me. I’m not so good at that.”
I picked up Macao, held him up in the air, waved his hand at Betty, and danced him around. My mother looked wary. “Don’t break him,” my mother said. “Don’t break the baby.”
I said, “I don’t think you can really break a baby. Here, you take him. I think he wants to come to you.”
Betty said, “Watch out. You would never forgive yourself if something happened to that child.”
“You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.” She was scared, nervous, frightened she would do something wrong, and I have come to believe that I, just a baby, sensed her fear and cried out when I felt it go through me. She never quite believed she could or would get it right with a baby, with her baby. She was not the type who could care for a child correctly. She was not good enough and then he turned out broken and, after all, someone had to be blamed. Someone had to have made her boy turn out wrong. She thinks she was the one. My sense of this is so strong, though I would do anything to make it not so.
Later, Macao was walking around and kept looking at my mother. Again and again he walked over to her and gazed up at her face. Shyly, she reached out for his hand and took it, very gently, in her own, his little fat hand. In a few minutes she stood up, trying so hard not to scare him as he waited to see what she would do. She walked with the baby so carefully, reaching down to hold his hand and guide him. They went outside where she told him the names of flowers, pointed out this and that.
After lunch was over, she even picked him up, took him outside again. It was as if she wanted to be alone with him, on her own, away from anyone who might spy her making a mistake. She held him as if he were a piece of delicate china, too fine to ever take down from its cabinet. Her fingers seemed wary, so full of caution. From the window, I could see her lips moving, whispering to him, but I could not make out what she had to say.
When she came back in with the baby, she grinned a little and announced, “He likes me, I think. I think he might like me.”
. . .
Betty thinks she is the one to blame for who I am. She was the one who got it wrong. There has never been anyone to tell her differently, because she never spoke of her fears. My father said nothing to reassure her. They didn’t talk.
For years and years, Betty tried her best to do everything right, to make me okay, to be good enough. When I was a child, as far back as I can remember, my mother read to me: The Story About Ping, Scuppers the Sailor Dog, The Happy Hollisters, poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses.
Night after night, year after year, after she finished the dishes or the wash and smoked a secret cigarette in the bathroom, she sat on the edge of my bed, in the light from the lamp, reading until her voice got tired or until I slept. Sometimes she added her own commentary:
“Let the crocodile have him. I’m sick of him,” or “That was kind of silly.”
She thought it important for me not to be ignorant, to read. My mother gave me words, though she has rarely been inclined to use them herself.