There are nineteen days until we part.
She’ll never know: her father’s hair is also red.
*
I never knew it was so draining to care for an infant. From seeing others tend them, I understood nothing of how urgent each action feels. And I didn’t know how such moments, stacked together, sap one’s strength, or what great weight the word tired can carry. I haven’t slept more than an hour continuously since—since: I can’t remember when.
At least I’ve worked out a way to write while she nurses. A pillow on my lap, this book upon it, and her body by its side. What a thrill, to do something other than stare at the plaster wall and count the clock’s ticking while she sucks!
She sucks and sucks. She sucks some more. My full milk hasn’t yet come in, but she has to suck or else she frets, then cries. My body feels her cry as if it were a bell ringing to announce a fire.
“Wakeful and watchful,” the doctor called her. To that I’ll add, in constant need of soothing. My nipples are split and scabbed. She sucks away the scabs each time she applies her grip, and new ones begin to form as soon as she detaches.
*
Another small respite, with the baby drowsy at one breast and a notebook on my thigh.
I want to know: What is it that enables mothers to continue feeding, cleaning, holding, and pouring forth concern, throughout the days and nights, despite this drastic lack of sleep? I should be crippled by it—I am crippled by it—yet I go on.
It seems my every self-protecting limit has dissolved.
This baby has broken my will! The will that used to protect me above all, and some new one has grown in its place. This new will makes me serve her needs and has no mercy for me.
Bless Nancy. She strokes my forehead with her dry, wide palm when I grow discouraged.
We’re in the recovery room together, Nancy and Mabel, Charlotte and me. We’ll stay in this room until others require it. Anne considers it best to keep the mothers apart from the mothers-to-be, so our meals are brought to us. Mabel mostly sleeps, leaving Nancy with little to do, so she holds Charlotte now and then, and looks wistfully upon her, no doubt thinking of William.
Someone must hold Charlotte, or else she bawls and shakes her arms and legs; her face grows red and blotchy.
But I mustn’t blame her for always needing to be held. How startling this world must be! A vast stretch of unbounded air. How can she be expected to lie alone in such hugeness, when she is used to living in a dark womb that supplied her everything?
My problem is how deeply she affects me.
The doctor cut the fleshly cord that connected us, but an invisible one has taken its place. I begin to suspect that this one can be neither cut nor broken.
Fourth Month 1, First Day
My full milk came in last night. Now Charlotte gulps, and milk trickles from the sides of her mouth. How marvelous: I am a mammal! Kin to the cats and cows that nursed in our neighbors’ barn, and to all the furry mothers of field and forest.
And Charlotte? Like any newborn mammal, she nurses furiously, gulping and gulping. On completion she emits a belch, with her belly grown as rotund as my breasts.
She looks at me now, with glittering eyes and slackened jaw. I look back, gratified.
There are new sensations to get used to. The sharp pain that shoots across is the milk rushing into the ducts, Dr. Stevens said. Then comes a tingling and a burning as the milk flows out, which she explained is also typical.
Apparently my dishevelment is beyond the typical. When Delphinia brings meals to Nancy and me, we trade pleasantries and recite the mealtime prayer of this place: “Lead us this day in right action, Lord, that we may become living proofs of Thy grace.” But this morning Delphinia could hardly speak for staring at me—at my hair unbrushed and falling from its combs, at the shoulders and front of my wrapper dotted with spit-up milk, at the clothing I’ve piled on willy-nilly to keep me warm.
“A mother should care for her appearance,” she instructed. Her silver hair was pinned back neatly, and her clothing, though softened by wear, was orderly.
“As if I wouldn’t care for my appearance,” I replied, “if this baby gave me the chance.” Though in truth I spend most of the precious minutes while Nancy holds Charlotte in writing, not primping.
Delphinia took pity. She brushed my hair, pinned it into a fresh bun, and refreshed my supply of clean clothing. Her ministrations brought on relieving sighs, and when Charlotte began to nurse again—her strong mouth pursing and pulling—my weariness had eased, and once more she seemed the dearest being on earth.
Her father was almost so dear to me.
I don’t think of him when she nurses, or when her legs travel the air like an upside-down chicken’s as I clean her bottom, or when I rinse her diapers in a tub or fold her laundered clothing or stare at the clock as she sucks and the hours crawl by. The orbs of her cheeks are nothing like his big, broad-cheeked face; her pert lips and urgent sounds resemble not his wide mouth and well-spoken sentences. I don’t think of him even when I stroke her red hair.
I think of him when she looks into my eyes and seems to say, Thee is my only love.
Her father loved me thusly. Or, I believed he did.
Fourth Month 3
The day is sunny and blustery. Wind whips pollen and tree blossoms into the window screens. Through the bars on the recovery-room windows, I see the other girls hanging damp laundry on the clotheslines that run along one side of the building.
Mabel left yesterday, taken by an adoption agent to a family with several other orphans, leaving Nancy free. She went soon after to an intelligence office to apply for housemaid positions. But before Nancy stepped out the door for the first time in months, she fretted, for she would have to lie. She couldn’t tell honestly why she’d left her previous household or why she hadn’t asked that household for a letter of reference. She practiced telling me she was new to Philadelphia and had labored in homes far from here—but the fabrications tangled on her tongue.
She did return to the Haven with a new position, as the maid in a rooming house for women. Then she passed her last afternoon and night on the bed beside mine. Sometime before dawn, I woke to stifled cries and saw her face buried in the flannel that had covered William. Perhaps she was seeking whatever scent of him remained.