“Stop it!” He held up a hand to cut me off. “That’s really enough. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how crazy you sound?”
“He … acknowledged our son,” I said. “He acknowledged that we had a son. That I had a baby. He understands my grief. I lost our child and you don’t even acknowledge that he existed!” I let out a sob. “I’m so lonely, Henry,” I said. “You don’t touch me. You don’t love me. I don’t love you! I don’t want to live this way for the rest of my life. I want you to let me out of this marriage. Please.”
To my surprise, he reached toward me. Pulled me to him. I melted into him, too weak and weepy at that moment to do anything else.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, and I knew that I had gotten through to him. “I’m so sorry, Tess.” He stroked my back. I wept against his shoulder, the scent of his aftershave fighting to come through the sweaty smell of his shirt. My own body shuddered with the end of my tears. It felt good to be held. I sank deeper into his arms.
“It will get better when we’re in our own house,” he said finally, “but I can’t be more to you than I am right now.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Many marriages survive this way,” he said, not answering my question. “Quite honestly, I think my own parents’ marriage was rather … loveless.”
“Don’t you want more than that?”
His smile was sad. “I want us to be happy together. Or at least, content. I know you want to be a nurse at the hospital, but that’s not in the cards. It’s not worth the battle with my mother, Tess, for either of us. This afternoon, you can use my car to gather donations, all right? Let’s go in the house and have some lunch. Then you can drive me back to the camp. They have a list of people who are donating all sorts of items and they need drivers to pick them up. You can help that way.”
I sighed, not wanting to fight any longer. “All right,” I said, though I wasn’t finished with this argument. Today I’d be an obedient wife and help with the donations. Tomorrow, I’d pick up this battle where we left it off.
61
I spent the afternoon dodging rain showers as I collected donations. I drove to the houses on the list I was given and gathered sheets and blankets, towels and hot plates, dishes and glasses and any other sundry items that would fit in the Cadillac—which I drove with great care. Then I brought the donations to the fledgling hospital and stored them in the freshly built cupboards of the two new pine wards. Each time I arrived at the hospital, I was astonished by the progress. The new switchboard was in. Therapy tubs were being set up. The sewer lines were functional. Fire hydrants had been installed on the grounds. Men carried in dozens of donated beds and cribs, lining the walls of the wards with them. Businessmen and carpenters, lawyers and plumbers—so many volunteers!—mucked through the mud, carried wood, cut down green trees as the donated lumber ran out, and hammered on the roof of the building that would eventually become the kitchen. All of them were working toward one end: getting the Emergency Infantile Paralysis Hospital up and running as quickly as possible.
I was amazed by the generosity of my Hickory neighbors as I drove from house to house. People scoured their homes for items they could share. They helped me load things into the car and thanked me for volunteering. Even people who were obviously struggling to make ends meet gave what they could, as well as those households with blue stars—and in one case, a gold star—hanging in their windows. Surely their minds were on their own families and not Catawba County’s sick children, but still they gave. Nearly everyone shared a story of a friend or acquaintance from another part of the country who had been touched in some way by polio. In one afternoon, I discovered something I hadn’t learned in my five difficult months in Hickory: the town was full of generous, compassionate people. My experience of Hickory had been limited to the Kraft family’s small circle of judgmental friends who’d seen me as a manipulative interloper. The majority of the townspeople were nothing like that at all.
*
It was possible, I discovered, to perspire even in the rain, and I was both sweaty, rain-soaked, and exhausted by four o’clock when I pulled the Cadillac up to one of the new wards and began unloading a batch of donations. I carried an armful of linens into the building and headed for the cupboards, where I found Ruth’s friend Mrs. Wilding, the woman whose niece was a nurse. I almost didn’t recognize her in capris and a sleeveless yellow blouse. She was checking the plug on one of the donated hot plates.
“Hello, Tess.” She smiled at me. “I heard you were collecting donations today too.”
“Yes.” I returned her smile as I set the linens on one of the cupboard shelves and brushed the sweat from my eyes. “Who knew it would be such hot, wet work?”
“That’s why I’m dressed this way,” she said. “I don’t ordinarily go out of the house like this, but really! You must be stifling in those nylons.”
“I am,” I admitted. A dozen times that afternoon, I’d thought about stopping home to change into something more comfortable, but I hadn’t wanted to take the time.
“But you’re Ruth Kraft’s daughter-in-law, aren’t you.” She gave me a knowing smile, then chuckled. “You have an image to uphold.”
I tried to determine what was behind her teasing tone. Sympathy? Understanding? Whatever it was, at that moment I felt she was on my side.
“I try.” I smiled back. Wanting to get the conversation off myself, I motioned behind us toward the two long rows of beds and cribs. “This is amazing, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “This is Hickory,” she said. “The real Hickory. I’m glad you’re finally getting a chance to see it.”
*
I was heading back to the Cadillac for yet another load of linens when a truck pulled—way too fast—into the clearing. Everyone looked up from his or her work, including Henry, who was hammering molding around one of the windows. I gasped, afraid the truck was going to plow straight through Henry and the window, but it stopped short of the building with a squeal of brakes.
A man and woman jumped from the cab, wild-eyed, wild-haired. Both of them were dressed in dungarees, and the man grabbed Henry’s arm.
“We need a doctor!” he shouted.
“Our boy!” the woman said, lowering the tailgate and climbing into the truck bed. “He woke up with the polio!”
“The hospital’s not up and running yet,” Henry said to them, gently extricating himself from the man’s grasp. He looked toward the rear of the truck, and I walked toward the truck myself, trying to see inside the bed. A crowd of workers was beginning to gather around it. “You’ll have to take him to Charlotte,” Henry said. “There’s no medical staff here yet.”
“Charlotte!” the woman said, kneeling down in the truck bed. “That’s too far. He could die!”