After the Fog (3 page)

She yanked open a drawer and flipped a worn dishcloth to Johnny. He wiped his mouth and straightened, leaning against the sink, mirroring Rose’s stance.

Rose fluffed his hair, its Vaseline sheen lost during the night. “Go back to bed for an hour.”

“Can’t sleep.”

Rose put her hand over Johnny’s. “You have a big week ahead of you.”

He stiffened. A grimace flashed across his normally affable expression. Rose was hard on him regarding his future, but she knew when to push and when to let go. An argument about the importance of college and a scholarship wouldn’t help anyone at this hour.

“I was wondering,” Johnny said. He squeezed Rose’s hand and seemed to search her face for permission to continue. “Maybe we could talk about college. This week, before the game.”

Rose closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek. She could not have this conversation again. “Sure, college. We’ll talk about how you’re getting a football scholarship and heading off to live it up in a fraternity house, smoking cigars after colossal wins and big tests. You just rest up for your game.”

Johnny laughed. “I know. Good rest, good food, good game on Saturday.”

Rose caught the mockery as he repeated the words she said to him many times. Johnny was a good kid and must have been tired, and Rose let his sarcasm pass. She could trust him, but couldn’t trust that she would have money to fund the community nursing project another year.

So, she put her focus there—on her nursing skill and experience that would persuade the new mill superintendent’s wife to direct any charitable funds she could toward the project. It wasn’t in Rose’s nature to ass-kiss and it would take all her attention and energy to do it well. Conflict upon conflict would not help anyone.

“You’re a good boy, Johnny. Keep your wits about you and say your prayers and everything will be fine. You follow our plan and someday you’ll be falling all over yourself to thank me.”

He nodded and headed toward the hall, jumping to slap the doorjamb as if he were dunking a basketball. He turned back to Rose. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “Something’s going on with Magdalena. Said she’s not roller-skating with the girls after school, even
if
all the smart boys are going to be there. She had
that
look, that scrunchy one where you know she’s going to lay you out if you press her one more second.”

Rose turned on the faucet and washed her hands. Magdalena was as moody as Johnny was jovial. They may have been twins, but in recent years they seemed to take different emotional paths through life.

“I’m familiar, yes,” Rose said, pulling a coffee mug from the cabinet and setting it beside the percolator.

“Mum, this thing with Mag. I mean, I know you’re busy, but this time you really should stop and just really listen. She needs you. That’s all.”

Rose nodded, but was already rehearsing what she’d say to Mrs. Sebastian to demonstrate her value, to persuade her that even the most destitute citizens deserved health care.

Johnny shrugged then spun into the air, whacked the doorjamb and disappeared into the hall.

“Next time, take a rag and wipe up there if you’re going to be jumping that high, anyhow.” Rose felt a smile squeeze her cheeks before sadness made her bite her lip. He was a smart kid. She could trust him, couldn’t she?

“My sweet, sweet boy.” Rose said to no one. “You just keep your shit straight and all will be well.”

R
ose headed into the cellar to clean her instruments. She felt along the wall for the light. The paint lifted from the plaster like a leper’s skin. The cellar was built to hold coal, a toilet and a cinder block shower that cleansed the bodies of smoke-caked steelworkers. The shower kept a marginal amount of soot out of the house. At least it made the housewives in Donora feel as though it did.

In a room dimly lit by one bulb, Rose waited for scalding water to fill the utility tub. The scent of bleach and green soap overwhelmed the space. Rose placed her instruments into the water to soak, and changed out of her uniform. She plucked the buttons and specks of Isabella’s dried blood flicked off the fabric.

She shook her uniform down and stepped out of it. Only the hem of her slip was blackened from the mill smoke outside. She rolled down her stockings and analyzed them for future wear. For night calls perhaps, bleached to nearly nothing, they might pass.

Rose dunked her uniform into the water and rubbed at the material, scouring away thoughts of sadness and loss. In a second tub, hands plunged into the water; she scrubbed her instruments, intent on scraping deathly images from her mind with the cadenced movement of her work.

The sound of someone stumbling startled Rose. On the steps, arms extended above his head, stood Unk grasping the bare wood boards crisscrossing the low-slung ceiling.

“Sweet
Jesus
, you scared the living hell right out of me.” His blaze-white legs caught her attention and her gaze trailed past his arthritic, cauliflowered knees to his veiny thighs, and finally to his shriveled penis and dangling sacks.

“Ahh, Unk. Your
pants
.” Rose snatched a scrap of rag, dried her hands and hurried toward him. “Where are your night-pants, old man?”

Unk’s face whitened with the fight he constantly had with his bad lungs. “Rosie? The mills? Any word?” His words came out in a squeak.

He stepped further down and braced himself on the banisters. Rose grasped his torso to support him and shook her head. “You’ll break your damn neck and be half-naked doing it. How’ll that look when Doc comes to set your hip or your arm or whatever?”

Unk’s slack jaw and narrowed eyes conveyed confusion. His chest expanded, thick with phlegm, and he coughed into his hand.

Rose sliced the air with her hand. “Stay in bed, Unk. Doc said not to wander the house at night. You’ll snap your neck.”

He begged Rose for some vodka. “Just comin’ to get the money,” he said. “Damn kid lost it again. And, a nip while you finish the instruments. I’ll be good. Just sit here loungin’ a bit. Don’t want to be alone.”

Rose ignored her sadness at Unk’s beginning signs of dementia and settled him onto the stair. His breathing settled down. She certainly understood Unk’s desire not to be alone—she’d grown up in an orphanage and the brittle pain from that experience still came to mind when she least expected it.

Rose reached above Unk’s head into a small opening between the studs in the exposed wall, dislodging a bottle of vodka. She opened the lid and took a swig before putting it to his lips, cradling his chin as he swallowed. Rose closed her eyes and let the vodka warm her insides and dissolve the sudden helplessness she felt.

If Unk was wearing pants, his company would have been welcomed. She could not allow him to sit naked in a filthy cellar. She screwed the lid back on the vodka and tucked it back into its nest.

She took his elbow and guided him up the front stairs. “This has to stop.” Rose said.

“Shut up, Rosie. You’re just not that nice.”

“Ah, you shut up, old man.”

“I just wanted to get the money. He lost it again.” Unk turned to Rose. He opened his mouth to say something else, but he never formed words.

“
Who
lost it again? Not Henry.” Rose searched Unk’s face for the answer. “Buzzy?
Again
?” The thought of her brother-in-law gambling away his pay was too much for Rose to handle that day, any day, really. For two decades, she and Henry had cleaned up his messes and she’d had enough. Henry assured Rose that Buzzy would not gamble again. And if there was anything in her life that was not a crock of bull it was the word of her husband, Henry.

Unk opened his mouth again, but nothing came out. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, his jaw slack, saliva at the corner of his mouth curving down his chin.

With her thumb she wiped away the moisture, and cupped his face, his prickly whiskers pinching her palm. She put her free hand on the small of his back and nudged him forward. He buckled and Rose positioned herself behind him, her shoulder in the middle of his back.

“Go on, Unk, I have you.”

They stepped upward.

“Could solve all these problems,” Unk said, “if yunz guys would just save some money for once.”

Rose pushed against his body, to keep them both steady and heading upward.

“I see what you’re saying.” Rose rolled her eyes, knowing he understood the many ways Rose and Henry had shared and lost their money to family members, not their own careless spending. The dementia ripped his memory and when he tried to form coherent thoughts, he stitched facts and words together like a crazy quilt. Colorful, but not at all representative of their initial form.

“I can’t shave you today,” she said. “I’m due to show one hoity-toity lady the benefit of community nursing. Need to get her to loosen up her purse strings so our citizenry can keep in good health.”

Unk grunted in response. His foot caught on a step, reminding Rose of when her children first learned to walk up stairs. She wished she had time to take extra special care of Unk.

But, if she couldn’t get Mrs. Sebastian to fund the clinic, it would close until they found another revenue source. They’d been funded for one year—the project’s first year—to see if Donora could even use one nurse the way Pittsburgh used dozens. Rose’s thousands of home visits reassured her; the answer would be yes. They didn’t need the entire operation funded, but enough for the over fifty percent of patients she saw who didn’t have insurance or couldn’t partially pay.

“I’ll send Magdalena to shave you before she heads out to school,” Rose said.

“She’s cranky that one. A beauty, but touchy,” he said. “And what about that money? Lost it again. Call Doc Bonaroti. He’ll be in the know.”

Rose and Unk stopped on the landing that led to the third floor. She bent over; resting her hands on her knees while Unk leaned on her back, digging his fatless elbows into her spine.

“It’s not right to fib, Rosie,” Unk said.

She craned over her hunched shoulder to see from his expression if Unk was purposely forming these thoughts. “What?” Rose said.

“Everyone’s a liar, Rosie. Everyone. ‘Cept Auntie Anna, ‘course, not her.”

Rose laughed. That didn’t help narrow the fibbers’ pool. A rectangular shot of daylight came through a window and lit the worn braided rug. The chute of brightness bulleted through the air, illuminating all the dust particles people never noticed until they blanketed the entire house.

“Oh come on, old man.” Rose said and stood. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that Unk was confused as expected, but maybe not completely off in what he was getting at. And, as her twenty minutes tending to Unk turned into forty, she decided transforming the living room into a convalescence room might not be such a bad idea after-all.

* * *

Sara Clara from The South. That’s what they called her. It shouldn’t have bothered her. But the way they said it, spit from clumsy Western Pennsylvanian tongues, it stabbed and mocked her, endlessly reminding her and everyone else she was an outsider. There in her shoebox-shaped bedroom she would burrow under her covers, taking shelter from the list of things to do that blitzed her at every turn once she left it.

Sara Clara ran her fingers down her throat and forced a cough to be sure she was still alive. Suffocating. The town, the family, the mills, the house—all of it recalled the dirty wool socks her brothers used to stuff in her face when they crammed her into the clothes hamper for the fun of it.

The difference was her former clothes hamper was gilded and she knew deep down, her brothers loved her. Nothing in Donora was gilded. And though everyone acted as if the glittering steel that belched from one end of town to the other was gold, Sara Clara knew the truth.

She lay in her husband’s childhood bed naked except for a pair of yellowed underpants, and pulled the thin sheet to her chin and flung one arm above her head, the other draped out to the side, clawing at the mattress. Sara Clara wished Buzzy was beside her instead of slaving away all night then sleeping all day while she tried to make Rose and Henry like her, make friends with anyone, and raise a son in a town where no one had the time for her.

Years back, when Sara Clara had met Buzzy at a North Carolina bar full of airmen, Buzzy had gushed about his home. Oh, how all of the Pavlesics would love her, Buzzy had said. Everyone would. His face flushed with the tales of the way money was forged from the earth, ripped right from the ground the town was built upon. Like money grew on trees—it was the same thing, he told her.

But, it wasn’t just the idea that Buzzy might make a fortune once they went up north that attracted her. It was the way he looked at her, as though she were a prize, as though he’d never seen a more beautiful, perfect woman in the world. That was what kept her up at night as she replayed every moment of their time together before they were married.

The love for her that she saw in his face and felt in his touch was like nothing she’d experienced. That and the possibility of money, to have the type of life she was used to, but in a new place, was enough to make her leap at the chance to follow love, to make a change.

She closed her eyes and tried, yes, there it was—the memory of that tender, glowing sensation that accompanied the smile when she agreed to marry Buzzy. Alone in his bed, lost in memories, she could feel Buzzy pull her into a kiss, his hands working their way down her body, bringing their marital promises to life. She was filled with longing, love and hope.