Emotions roiled through my body and brought on a sweat. Charlotte pulled her mouth from me and began to cry, sensing my distress. For her sake, I closed my eyes and pulled her closer, concentrating only on her form against me. With surprising quickness, we both grew calm.
Within that calm, at long last, I no longer feared my father. I would say just who had done the worse disgracing. I looked at a grimy wall, at the torn shreds of paper dangling in the overheated air.
“And thee?” I asked. “How many weeks did thee wait after Mother’s death before—” My voice caught and my stomach tightened. “Before taking up the bottle, and bedding thy cousin, and disgracing our family name?”
His silence told me I’d hit my mark. At last he said, “I followed my own way, the Discipline be damned.”
“And thy children be damned? Did thee not guess that we’d all suffer, as occupants of thy house, and that I’d be suspended from my work?”
He sighed, as if my having a point of view inconvenienced him. “I did what I needed to do. I have the right to act as I wish.”
“Regardless of the costs to others,” I snapped. “Costs thee hasn’t taken a moment to notice.”
Eventually he replied. “I suppose I haven’t.” He sighed. “I suppose I haven’t noticed much at all.” His face grew soft and baffled, as it always had when he’d been faced with his own shortsightedness.
His apology went unspoken, but I relished it. He pushed his hand across the coarse surface of what had briefly been our table, then tried again to bring the parts together. “Piece of factory junk. Has thee got any glue?”
“Only flour and water.” I leaned my lips to Charlotte’s head, to her silken hair.
“No sense fixing this anyway. I’ll bring a small table. It won’t take but a day or two to make.” He released the pieces to the floor, then pulled out his leather coin purse and opened its mouth. “Get a tea set, and some better tea.” He laid two dollar coins on the floor beside him.
The tea! I stood and looked to the pot on the stove, where the water had boiled dry. I had been going to brew it in that very pot, and the tea in a paper box upon the shelf was the worst dust, left after others had paid good money for the leaves. I was moved that he’d noticed, though more pressing items than a tea set needed buying. His nurturance had often been that unpredictable, that random.
“Many thanks,” I replied. I lowered my head to Charlotte and pulled the shawl back slightly to uncover her head as she nursed, watching her lips purse and listening to her gulp.
“My first grandchild.” Father huffed. “A bastard.”
I recognized in him the self-pity I’d seen in some drunks on the street. “Her name is Charlotte.”
“After my mother!” He stared in chagrin.
I was ready to tell him why I had every right to follow the naming pattern of our family, and how Charlotte had already survived much and proved worthy to be called after his mother, till I recalled old Hannah’s exhortation at the meetinghouse burying ground: “Thy father needs thee!”
“Has thee been unwell?” My voice quavered with stifled feeling.
“There was trouble with my liver, but I’m recovered.”
I waited to hear more. Through the opened window came the clarifying scents from our window box, where thyme, sage, and rosemary burst from the soil.
“We’ve got a baby coming very soon.” Father reached his feet to the floor ahead of him to give room to his long legs. “It’s difficult.”
“I understand.”
Did I? I knew there must be rancor in the house. I knew I wanted to get my private possessions away from his wife.
“When thee brings the table,” I said, “could thee bring my trunk?” My diaries should still be in there, and the silver spoons, which I might pawn, and the wedding linens. The oldest linens were from Grandmother, fragile and stained; the next oldest, starched and neatly pressed, were those Mother had made while dreaming of her someday marriage; atop those emblems of hopeful longing lay my own handiwork.
“I’ll try to bring it all within the week, unless the baby comes.” Father cleared his throat and stood. Charlotte leaned from me, ready for the other side, so I shifted and settled her. Father watched, the muscles of his face slackening.
“I was wrong to hold the letters back,” he said.
Tears clouded my vision as he stepped away; the door opened and clicked shut. His feet stomped down the stairs, growing ever farther and fainter.
I wondered if he would bring us a table. In the meantime, I supposed we’d eat off the floor.
*
I placed my sleeping baby down and put the two unopened letters on the shelf beside the stove. I craved them as keenly as if they were bread fresh from the oven, sliced and thickly buttered. But I also dreaded knowing their contents, which could just as well be like ice, or swords. Those letters would put some change in motion. They remained on the shelf all afternoon.
Near sunset, Johan returned from seeking work, hot and smelling of the street. He removed his jacket and stood before me, stains beneath the arms of his shirt, then pulled his suspenders over his shoulders. I had an unpleasant memory of Albert as Johan bent to kiss me. Still overheated, he removed his shoes and socks. On his long toes, gold-red hairs shone. He sat at one of our chairs, beside the pieces of our table.
“What happened here?” he asked. Like Father—like any craftsman, perhaps—he lifted the pieces and tried to fit them together.
I told him of Father’s violence and pointed to the withheld letters. He strode to the shelf and grabbed the envelopes.
“Open them!” He thrust them at me. “That solicitor was a liar. He wanted to pretend he’d done something, to get his fee!”
My heart cramped as I took the two letters and sat on the mattress, thinking less of their contents than of his unexpected temper, so like Father’s.
Yet on paper, my lover’s words did more than soothe; they made me ashamed of how readily I’d believed him a betrayer. He wrote of longing for me; he sent again their first address, then the next one, when their location changed; he went most days to the post office to see if I’d replied. The letter he’d sent when I was four months along, his second, consisted chiefly of him begging me to reply, if only to explain the reason for my shunning of him. He asked whether I’d found another love. He’d matured, he said; he wanted me to travel there as soon as possible. He enclosed four dollars, hoping I could supplement them with my own, and saying he would keep me when I arrived. He quoted his favorite bard:
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man.
The one sent on the day after Charlotte was born, his final missive, went as follows:
1883. 3rd mo. 30
To Lilli,
“Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.”
—
Those words of Robert Browning’s might as well be mine.
I’m puzzled at thy silence.
No, devastated. Did it mean nothing that I gave my word and body? That thee gave thine?
No matter; I have nothing for thee now. It doesn’t matter why. There’s only this: goodbye.