Chapter 36 Adelaide
adelaide
You said you moved to Mississippi a few months before the baby was due,” Hope prompted.
I opened my eyes. Apparently I’d dozed off, or maybe my thoughts had just meandered. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
My granddaughter and I were in my bedroom. It was the next day—or maybe the day after, or the day after that. Time had become liquid, moving and spreading all around. I was sitting in my rocker, and Hope was holding three loose housedresses with sunflowers on them.
No. It was one housedress, the one I’d asked her to pull out of my closet.
She brought it over and laid it in my lap. The fabric was light, but touching it, I could almost feel the heaviness of the padding I’d worn under it that summer.
Unbidden thoughts. The phrase floated through my head.
Maybe that wasn’t the word, unbidden—but then again, maybe it was.
Unbidden, as in unexpected and unwanted and uncalled-for, leaving you all undone.
One moment you’re doing something perfectly ordinary, and the next, you’re overrun by memories and feelings that leave you reeling and gasping.
I had a lot of those in the months that followed that Easter dinner where Charlie announced my so-called pregnancy. I closed my eyes and fell back into my story.
1948
We moved to a rental house in Jackson, a squalid little two-bedroom thing. Charlie had deliberately picked a place too small for either of our families to stay overnight.
The days ground on. Charlie was busy starting up the new store, and caring for the kids kept me hopping.
He stopped drinking when we moved, and things eased between us.
He finally told me a little about the other woman—about as much as I’d told him about Joe.
She was someone he’d met at a roadside bar.
He’d been lonely and she’d been a good listener.
She’d just been dumped by someone she loved, and well, that was when he’d been eaten up with jealousy over Joe, and they’d gravitated toward each other because hurt attracts hurt.
He said they hadn’t meant anything to each other in any way that really mattered.
As time went on, I actually began to look forward to the baby, to having a new life to care for. Maybe Charlie and I could build a new life together, as well—his, mine, and ours. Maybe, in some weird way, this really would even the score.
The first week in September, both sets of our parents drove up and picked up the children. They would care for them in Wedding Tree until the baby was born, freeing me to rest during the last weeks of my “pregnancy.”
At first I was lost without them, but then .
. . well, Charlie and I fell into a new pattern when it was just the two of us.
We’d play card games at night and take walks.
He made me laugh with stories and impressions about the people working in the new store, and he’d ask my opinion about situations and dilemmas, and we even began to make love again.
Up until then, I’d refused to sleep with him.
I’d told him if I had to pretend to be pregnant, he had to pretend so, too, and if I were having a difficult pregnancy, the doctor would forbid relations.
But in those last couple of weeks, we were almost like honeymooners.
Maybe it was the freedom of not having to wear the padding in the house when it was just the two of us; maybe it was the shared secret that bonded us.
For whatever reason, I felt happier in my marriage than I ever had. I felt optimistic for the future.
On September 24—I’ll never forget the date; it haunts me every year—I knew something was wrong.
I’d been restless all day, like a cat about to birth her kittens, then Charlie didn’t come home for dinner.
That, in and of itself, was unusual. He’d become solicitous and caring.
He’d started bringing me flowers and dancing with me to the radio and treating me like a woman he was trying to woo.
Charlie swore he wasn’t seeing the other woman, but I knew he stayed in touch somehow to see how the pregnancy was progressing.
I wasn’t jealous of her, which might be a little odd, but I knew he didn’t love her.
I felt sorry for her, actually. To have a baby, then give it up .
. . My womb ached just thinking about it.
I’d been faced with the choice and I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it.
I worried that this woman wouldn’t be able to, either, but Charlie said she absolutely didn’t want a baby, that she would have aborted it if he hadn’t talked her out of it.
I’d pestered him about her, wanting to know more about her, but there was a stubborn streak in Charlie—a part that wouldn’t give in. I have to admit, I admired that part of him. I just wished he’d used that stubbornness in a better way.
That night, the night of September 24, it got to be nine, then ten o’clock.
A thunderstorm rolled in, and the rain poured down in torrents.
I grew anxious. Was the baby coming? I inventoried all the baby’s things I had on hand—a bassinet, blankets, baby formula, a layette, bottles, diapers .
. . I touched each item, longing to put it to use.
Was Charlie at that woman’s house, waiting to bring the baby home to me?
Back then, men didn’t take part in delivery, but maybe he was hanging around if the baby was on the way.
If that were the case, though, why didn’t he call and tell me?
I picked up the phone three times and asked the party line operator if it was working.
I would have picked it up again, but I was too embarrassed.
Instead, I paced the floor until it was a wonder I didn’t wear a path in the linoleum.
As the night stretched on, another scenario formed in my mind—a scenario more likely than a baby on the way and no call from Charlie.
Chances were, Charlie was just back to being his old drunken self.
He was probably at a bar, leaving me stuck alone in the storm, unable to leave the house without wearing the oppressive padding because we’d led all the neighbors and townsfolk to think I was in the family way.
The more I thought about it, the more indignant I became. Why, I had half a mind to call my folks to come get me.
And say what? Mother, Father, I was lying to you about being pregnant?
I sank onto the old floral sofa with a hard sigh, feeling the springs dig into my backside.
The width and breadth of the lies I’d told made confession impossible.
For a girl who couldn’t lie well, I’d sure come up with some doozies.
It was like being halfway across a swamp, surrounded on all sides by alligators. There was no way out but through.
I finally dozed off on that beaten-up sofa, then jerked awake to see Charlie limping through the door, looking like he’d been through a battle. I glanced at the clock in the kitchen; it was a few minutes before five in the morning.
Backlit by the porch light, his hair and clothes glistened with rain. A puddle formed on the floor around him. Good Lord, he was soaked to the bone. His face was pale, and his mouth was set in a tight line.
He reeked of cheap bourbon. My heart clutched in my chest.
“It’s over,” he said, closing the door. A hint of light through the window kept the room from being totally black.
“What do you mean?”
“The baby. It’s all done.”
I pushed up on my elbows, my legs still stretched out on the sofa, my heart pounding with excitement. “It’s born?”
“Yeah.”
Anticipation flooded me, but stopped short of joy. Charlie didn’t look like a man celebrating the birth of a child. And that whiskey smell—it always came with trouble. “Where is it?”
He wavered, like a man with a ship rolling under his feet. “Dead.”
I couldn’t breathe. “What?”
“Something wrong with your hearing?”
Oh, dear God. His voice was cold, dangerous, knifelike. Whoever had called it “Demon Rum” was right. When Charlie was drinking, he was like a man possessed.
I swung my feet off the sofa and turned on the lamp on the side table. That’s when I saw he had blood on his shirt—lots of it. I put my hand to my throat. My pulse fluttered under my palm like hummingbird wings. “Was it stillborn?”
“Might as well have been.”
“What does that mean?”
“Same as I said.” He sank into a vinyl chair in the breakfast alcove, next to the living room.
A sick, sour taste filled my throat. My eyes fixed on his shirt, my mind spinning, my stomach tight with fear. Something was terribly, horribly wrong. “Did you help deliver it?”
“No.”
“Then why are you all bloody?”
“Don’t ask questions.”
My stomach roiled. I thought I might throw up. “B-but I have to know what happened. Everyone will want to know what happened—our parents and grandparents and the children . . . everyone.”
He sank his head in his hands.
Fear gripped me so hard I shook. “Was it a boy or a girl?”
“Boy.”
“So . . . where . . . where is he?”
“No more questions!” he bellowed.
I stared at him, trying to make sense of the situation. Oh, Charlie—what have you done?
“Don’ you worry about it. Just get your stuff together. We’re going back.”
“Now?”
“Later today.”
“But . . .”
“No buts.” His voice had that old, ugly, mean tone. “You should be happy about this, Addie.”
Happy?
“You’re off the hook. You don’t have to raise a bastard.”
“But, Charlie . . . after all this, I wanted . . .” Hysteria was building in my chest. My gaze went to the empty bassinet in the corner of the room. “What did you do, Charlie?”
“Nothin’ that concerns you.”