But Whitman’s lines did not enchant me. For such sentiments proclaim the glory of indulgence without a single glance at its dangers—its dangers to a woman, in particular, who believes the words of a quivering and openhearted man whose body lies naked over her. This sort of man is a hazard to womankind, for he departs with satisfaction, “free and lawless,” yet leaves her paying, paying, all her life.
I’ve tried to explain to Johan my hard-won understandings. But he considers them “merely circumstantial”; if he’d known of my pregnancy, he says, he would have come to marry me, and I would have kept the faith he lives in. “There’s nothing suspect,” he told me, “in the passion that the Camden bard expresses.”
But there is no such thing as merely circumstantial. Circumstances are all. What has occurred can’t be undone. The chasm between us makes me lonely.
Will I ever tell Johan that I ate from sidewalks, took laudanum for dissolute days, begged for pennies, drugged babies through my breast? Will I confess to having earned a dollar of my purse by sexual congress, tried to become a man’s paid strumpet, stolen a baby’s gown, pondered taking my own life when the callous world piled insults upon me?
Will I one day tell our daughter that her early months were lived in exile and deprivation—that she faced mortal hazards then?
Do secrets matter? No one life can be entirely shared by another.
Yet I’m marked by these trials, and he doesn’t know why.
As he is marked by his trials.
He sleeps the sleep of the untroubled, however, even on the floor (for he and Peter gave the small mattress to Charlotte and me).
When I sleep, trouble dogs my dreams. I’m on the street again, with Charlotte dying or being taken from my arms; or I’m struggling to get her from the almshouse before she starves; or my breasts have turned to stone, when she needs my milk to live.
The sores on my feet have healed. I can tolerate the rub of stockings and shoes.
Sixth Month 30
Peter has finally found work, at a printer’s. For six ten-hour days, he’ll earn fourteen dollars a week—far more than the twenty-five a month I earned toiling day and night for the Burnhams. He despises working with enormous machines, but he says that a room of loud presses will be far better than the open-hearth department at the steel mill, where he did common labor. He’d return to Father’s workshop, he said, if he could.
For his part, Johan’s had no luck at finding work because of his damaged hand and is spending less and less time trying. The good side of this is his increased time with Charlotte. She no longer cries when he holds her. The tenderness in his demeanor soothes her—and me, to watch it.
He seems an honest man. Did the solicitor find a different Johannes Ernst, another red-haired Pittsburgh resident? I must have evidence. I can’t risk another fall.
Yesterday Charlotte was three months old. She shows so many skills. She laughs, squeals, and tries to lift her head while on her stomach. She clasps her sticky hands together and reaches for her feet. To know a thing, she opens her mouth to encompass it. Peter carved her a wooden rattle, and she clutches the handle in her fist, then crams its orb into her mouth as far as it can fit, licking. Into that cave she moves every item she can reach—the side of my hand, an edge of my shawl. All the while, she makes a clear, declarative sound: “Ah! Ah!”
As if to say, “I am! Look what I can do!”
Sometimes when the men talk, she becomes too distracted to continue nursing; she turns sideways to stare. She sends them the exploratory beginnings of letter sounds—a v and a d. Then, in place of feeding, she arches her back and pushes against me until I lay her on the ground. Her father and her uncle help her practice rolling over.
She seems so vital, yet I worry about the lasting effects of her hard weeks. No doubt there will be some. What indelible impressions have formed already in her?
The first time I saw a monarch butterfly and pointed, Mother told me, “Butterfly.” I memorized the word, matching it to the tubular body, the antennae, the ochre and black wings. “Butterfly,” I intoned with effort. Until one day another winged being flew by, clothed in different colors. Upon inquiring, I heard, “Butterfly.”
Confusion beset me. How could it be?
By this I came to understand the notion of a category. Mother, Father, and brother are people; monarchs and other floating beings with chalky wings that land on flowers and suck their milk are butterflies. Yet the monarch remains my original butterfly. Every other seems a displacement.
What original butterflies have lodged themselves in Charlotte’s brain? What representatives of categories are in permanent place? Might she, for instance, seek unsafe or chaotic streets in her future, or circumstances of privation, finding them to hold an oddly familiar comfort?
Oh, dear baby, flesh of my flesh…I want better for thee.
Seventh Month 2
Johan noticed the scar on Charlotte’s bottom—the remnant of her sore—and wanted to know how she’d been injured. In halting sentences I told him of her confinement at the almshouse, then took us backward in time to Gina’s, the Burnhams’, Gerda’s, the Haven, even to my months with Father and Patience. I spoke as sparely as I could, with subdued expression, because otherwise I might have been overcome. Then I brought him quickly past our homeless days, leaving out the incidents with Albert and the begging and the hunger and so much more, and commencing again with that afternoon before he and Peter found me, when I sat with Charlotte under the pear trees. I reminded Johan of what he’d showed me in an apple. I told him that wanting to show Charlotte the star inside a fruit had given me a reason not to die—as foolish as that sounded.
“So thee understands,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing.
“What?”
“How much the common beauty means.”
“Of course. But not just beauty.” I explained my notebooks, and how I’d survived by telling, held on through the daily increase of these pages.
“Held on? Survived? A reason not to die? What don’t I know?”
I flushed.
“I’m sorry.” He brought my hand toward his mouth and pressed the back of it to his lips. “I’ll never read thy diaries. I owe thee that.”
This made me lonelier. Can’t I ever tell anyone all that happened? Not even Johan will insist upon it? If he had diaries, I would want to read them.
Seventh Month 3
Charlotte and I had a visitor this morning, shortly after Peter left for work and Johan went to offer himself at more shops and businesses. The visitor stomped up three flights of stairs and sent a strong knock through our room.
“Who is it?” I called. I had on my Mother Hubbard dress, and my hair was loose and frowsy.