“Well,” I said, thinking it was time to bring this “Reverend Sam” conversation to a close. At least she’d gotten me out of my “doldrums.” “Thank you for telling me about him.”
We both turned at the sound of a door opening and closing downstairs, and Hattie immediately jumped to her feet, sheets in her arms. She didn’t want to be caught taking a break. Or perhaps she didn’t want to be caught talking to me. She walked toward the door, then turned back to look at me.
“You gonna go see him?”
“I don’t think—”
“He lives in Ridgeview,” she said, glancing toward the hallway and the stairs. “You know where that’s at—Colored Town? Big blue house on Second Avenue. Diffent from all them other houses. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “And I’m sorry you lost your brother, Hattie.”
“Oh, he’s still around, Miss Tess,” she said from the doorway. “Jest like your mama.”
23
I kept to myself my first few weeks in the Kraft house. Around Ruth and Lucy, I feigned ignorance as though I had no idea they knew I was carrying a child. But I discovered that Henry rather liked talking with me about the baby. At night, we’d lie on our mismatched twin beds and have long conversations about names—he liked Andrew after his grandfather while I favored Philip after my father. If it was a girl, I wanted to name her after my mother—Maria—but Henry refused to even consider it. “Mary” was as close as he was willing to come. I was so certain my baby was a boy that I didn’t make an issue out of it. It was clear that Henry thought his claim on naming our male child was stronger than mine. It would be a Kraft, after all. We ultimately decided on Andrew Philip Kraft.
“Not Andy,” Henry said. “Never Andy.”
Secretly, though, I thought of the little charmer inside me as “Andy” all the time. I loved the cuteness of the name. I loved imagining what he would look like. My dark hair and Henry’s blue eyes? What a handsome combination that would be. And I loved Henry’s excitement. He was dreaming of the future with our child, just as I was. Finally we had something in common. It was thoughts about my baby that got me through those early days in the Kraft house. He—or she—kept me going.
When Henry and I weren’t talking about the baby, though, our marriage felt empty and false. Henry touched me only in front of others, as though he wanted people to think we were a close and loving couple when we were anything but. In his bedroom, there wasn’t even the pretense of us being husband and wife. He was not unkind to me, but rather … businesslike. Our marriage had been a business arrangement right from the start, I realized. I shouldn’t have expected anything else. Might I someday fall in love with him? Would he someday fall in love with me? I prayed that would happen, yet how could I ever give my heart to a man when it still, deep down, belonged to another?
When Ruth and Lucy were out and I felt free to poke around, I explored the house. I read some of the books in the well-stocked library, and I felt some warmth toward Ruth when I paged through the family scrapbook she kept on the small table by the library window. The scrapbook was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings that obviously had meaning to her. Her wedding announcement was in there. Henry’s and Lucy’s birth announcements. The whole history of the Kraft family told through newspaper articles, starting with the building of the factory in the late nineteenth century. I couldn’t believe I was now a part of that family, although I imagined there wouldn’t be a mention of me in the book until baby Andrew—or Mary—was born.
Outside the Kraft house, I felt conspicuous. Once I took a cab into town while Henry was at work, wanting to get to know Hickory better. I walked past the shops and restaurants, learning my way around, and I felt as though the gaze of everyone I encountered was on the middle of my body. Everyone suspected, yet no one said a word—to me, at least. My girdle had become unbearable and I knew that soon I would need to buy maternity clothes and people would then know what they’d already guessed. Although she never spoke to me about my condition, Ruth stared at my stomach every time I walked into the room, and she spoke to me with a politeness that I knew masked her disdain.
Lucy, on the other hand, didn’t bother to hide her feelings. She was downright derisive of me. She criticized my hair, which I always struggled to tuck neatly into a bun and victory roll.
“You need to cut it,” she told me over the breakfast table one morning when it was just the two of us. “And you should really have it thinned. It’s too much hair to do anything with. Plus, you need to tweeze those eyebrows.”
I’d been tweezing my eyebrows since I was fifteen. I was confident they were well shaped, but even so they were thick and dark. They’d always been my curse. My dark looks had fit in perfectly in Little Italy, but here they set me apart, as though I needed anything else to make me feel like a stranger in Hickory.
I struggled to find a way to respond to Lucy’s insults. I put up with a great deal, not wanting to alienate her. I usually smiled and agreed with her about my terrible eyebrows, my ornery hair, my unstylish clothing, laughing at myself along with her while inside I seethed. I couldn’t say what I truly thought or felt in this house. I was losing myself here. Losing Tess, day by day.
I was stir-crazy toward the end of my second week in Hickory and decided to visit the public library. Wearing one of my new skirts, new blue cardigan, and new cream-colored coat, I took a cab into town and was contentedly exploring the library’s fiction shelves when I came across A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I’d found that book on my mother’s night table a few days after her death, a bookmark close to the end, and I’d donated it to St. Leo’s along with all her other belongings. Now, I pulled the book from the stack and cradled it in my hands. My mother must have enjoyed it to make it nearly to the end. She had a habit of starting books and not finishing them.
At the front desk, I filled out a form to get a library card. The middle-aged woman looked at my information, but didn’t seem at all interested in the fact that I was a Kraft and I was relieved. She gave me my card and the book and sent me on my way.
Outside the library, I hugged the book close to me, not only because the day was cold. I couldn’t wait to start reading. I wanted to feel close to my mother.