Chapter Thirteen #2
She wondered, anew, about the circumstances surrounding her mother’s pregnancy.
To be pregnant and not want to be, to carry a child you’d rather not have inside you—she understood that much now, at least. The desperate desire to be past the whole physical experience.
Had her mother, pregnant, known she wasn’t going to keep the baby?
Or had she decided that after the fact? Margaret couldn’t ask Lydia these things, because Lydia didn’t know.
Lydia also didn’t know she was pregnant, because Margaret hadn’t mentioned it—even in a postcard.
She wouldn’t have been able to bear Lydia’s excitement, the questions her follow-up letters would contain, the demands for updates.
She missed her body, from before.
And she worried about Felix—because, for all her worry that he would return the same way he’d left, he hadn’t.
—
By March of 1946, Felix’s body was fully healed, if a little battle-worn.
His left wrist clicked when he moved it but didn’t hurt anymore, his shoulder only hurt when he slept on it wrong.
But he was far from his old self. It was as if the war had taken him apart and the Navy had put him back together differently.
After eating heartily for the first couple of weeks, making up for the less-than-stellar meals he’d been describing in his letters for the past three years, he now had almost no appetite.
He seemed always lost in thought—as if an undertow were tugging him away.
He stepped into rooms and seemed to have to wait for his compass needle to align.
There were times when she spoke and he didn’t hear her—not a word, until she raised her voice.
She’d watched him loosen his tie at the end of the day and then just stand there with his finger hooked around the knot, staring off somewhere.
Then he was back again—as if his mind had different frequencies, and some of them were at home, but much of the time the dial was tuned elsewhere.
“Vic’s like that,” Ruth told her. “Then out of the blue he starts yelling—at me or the kids, it doesn’t seem to matter to him.
Plus, he’s drinking more than ever. I keep reminding myself, I don’t know what went on over there.
I don’t know what he had to do. At least he’s back on his mail route and enjoying it. ”
That sounded bad, but it also sounded different from what Margaret was experiencing with Felix.
Felix rarely drank. He never yelled. On good days, he went to work in the morning and came home in the evening, tired but alert and steady.
On bad days, he left the house a little late in the morning, got home a little early, and went the entire evening with hardly a change in his glassy expression.
On the worst of the bad days, he called in sick, though there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with him.
On those days—and on the weekends—he stayed in his robe and pajamas until noon, at least. If he went outside at all, it was to sit in the backyard and smoke.
He kept telling her he was fine—until she asked the obvious question: if he was fine, why wasn’t he going to work?
A checkup at the VA hospital in Findlay revealed nothing and resulted only in a recommendation that he take vitamins and eat more meat.
He couldn’t explain his debility, even while begging her, now and then, to call the plant for him and tell Mr. Westbrook that he was once again under the weather.
She worried he was going to get in trouble because of so many missed days, and she didn’t want to prod him or do anything to impede his recovery—though at this point she wasn’t sure, beyond the obvious facts of three years at sea and at war, what he was recovering from.
He’d told her almost nothing about what had happened to him.
He’d said it was too difficult to talk about.
—
It was too difficult to carry around too.
People at the plant had tried to see things in his eyes, when he first got back.
He had nothing to show them. He went into that category of guys who won’t talk about it.
The days when he arrived at work late were the ones when he’d had to coax himself out of bed.
The days when he didn’t go in at all were the ones when he couldn’t see a way out of his sadness.
Or, he could see a way, but it was at the end of a tunnel that was always protracting before him, so that he was never even close to the mouth, that little disk of light where the house was, and where Margaret lived, and, soon, their child.
Everyone thought he was back, but he was still trying to get there.
After all that had happened with Augie, he felt awful for Margaret—not just because he’d slept with someone else, but because he felt like he understood her a little better now. He understood more about what she wanted from him, what she needed, and how he didn’t have it in him to give to her.
—
The pregnancy was his bright spot, she could tell.
The news had brought momentary life and light into his eyes—as if someone had found his master switch and was toggling it.
He’d sat down on the ottoman and put his ear to her stomach.
He’d started talking about names. Thomas, he said.
Thomas Aquinas. He quoted: The things that we love tell us what we are.
His reading had gotten heady overseas, apparently.
Thomas Aquinas Salt it would be, if it were a boy.
The girl’s name was up to her, and she picked Lydia.
For a middle name, she went to the First Lady: Bess.
Other than his reaction to the pregnancy, the most impacted she’d seen him was when he discovered how much money she’d spent while he was away.
He stood at the threshold of the living room holding the bankbook in one hand, his other hand open beside it as if trying to catch the numbers that might fall out.
She reminded him that he’d been gone for three years.
His eyes went from the quartzite facade on the fireplace, to the new sofa and chairs, to the wallpaper in the connector hall, to the Detrola, to the terrarium. “I wish you’d asked me about all this.”
She reminded him, also, that before leaving he’d told her the house was within her purview. How was she to know the war would go on for so long? Could they talk about this later? Could he not see that she was about to burst?
—
Nine months and one week into the pregnancy, on a brilliant Saturday in the third week of April, they were sitting in the living room, Felix on the sofa, reading Thurber, Margaret in the wingback chair holding her stomach and watching him read.
She took off her slipper and threw it at him.
He flinched as it bounced off his stomach. “What the hell?” he said.
She begged him to take her for a drive. Anywhere. She wanted to roll down the window and stick her head out, she felt that miserable. He went for his coat and keys. She was walking to the front door when her water broke.
—
Thomas Aquinas Salt came into the world while his mother was drenched in sweat and screaming at the ceiling.
There were five babies in the baby room, and since Felix couldn’t really see their heads or tell whose was whose, he made faces and waved at all five of them—until a nurse came along and asked who he was, then went in and brought a baby to the window.
When Felix found Margaret in her room, he told her Tom’s hair was a beautiful strawberry blond, probably on its way to being red, like hers.
Margaret knew that already. Then Felix started talking about what a good brother Tom was going to make one day, whenever they got around to having a second child.
Margaret’s labor had lasted eleven hours. She looked at her husband, his face fresh, his suitcoat pocket sprouting cigars. She said, “I’m never going through that hell again.”
—
She tried breastfeeding. It took the baby a while to latch, and when he finally did, she thought he was going to pull her nipple off.
She endured it as much as she could, kept switching sides, but it was too painful.
And the baby wanted to eat every two to three hours.
How? Dr. Clements told her some women experienced more pain than others when they breastfed, and that some women found it intolerable.
If her pain was extreme, she could switch to formula.
She shouldn’t feel like it was a reflection on her mothering skills, if she did.
“I don’t,” Margaret said. “Where do I buy formula?”
He told her she couldn’t buy it; she’d have to make it herself out of condensed milk, sterilized water, and corn syrup.
She’d also have to forego using a pump of any kind and let her milk evaporate; otherwise her body would just keep producing it.
On his advice, she sent Felix to the medical supply store to buy six glass bottles with nipples and a special rack for sterilizing them in a soup pot, then to the grocery store for the condensed milk and the syrup.
Her breasts were twice their normal size.
They hurt, and not just the nipple. At night, she could only lie on her back and didn’t even want a sheet to touch them.
It took a week for the pain to start abating, and another week for them to start going down.
Meanwhile, she stood over the stove sterilizing the bottles, sterilizing the water that went into formula, making the mixture and bottling it and refrigerating it, only to take it back out a few hours later to be warmed and served.
A constant flow of activity that reminded her of the daily work at Open Arms, only this child was hers, and no one was coming to adopt it.
—