After the Fog (6 page)

Buzzy slid the Donora Herald American from the table and snapped it open again in front of his face. “Oh looky here, Truman’s about to lose the election to Dewey. Nice. Another jackass running the world. Just what we need.”

“We’ll talk all right,” Rose said, “but I’m busy this morning. Doc Bonaroti set me on that Sebastian woman thinking I can get her to pop open her Chanel handbag for the sad sacks of Donora. He’s convinced I can persuade her to fund the clinic.”

“He’s right,” Henry said.

Buzzy dropped his paper and put his hand to his ear. “I think I hear Magdalena calling.”

“Ass,” Rose said and ambled toward the hallway. Henry watched her disappear from sight, and from figuring out she was right to suspect Buzzy was in trouble again, and Henry was privy to it.

Henry hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until Rose left the room and he was assured Buzzy couldn’t reveal anything. Henry took the moment of peace and turned back to his poetry. He slipped into Auden’s world of poetic, human interaction, thankful Rose was too distracted by her lack of clinic funding to push either of the two men on any matter at all. They’d been given a reprieve. For how long, Henry didn’t know.

* * *

The looks that passed between Henry and Buzzy troubled Rose, but not nearly as much as the recurrent images of Isabella and what it would mean for the Greshecky family. She covered her mouth, feeling like she needed to shield herself from an unseen, malignant force. The sound of furniture being pushed across the floor above her called to mind Sara Clara—the obvious, futile presence in the house.

Perhaps the noise above was evidence that Sara Clara was finally going to contribute to the household without any more fuss. But, even thoughts of Sara Clara laying around in bed all day instead of contributing to the family, would have to wait.

Rose rapped on Magdalena’s door. No reply. Must be in the bathroom. Rose crossed her arms and tapped her foot, waiting. Magdalena’s door opened and she slunk into the hallway using the wall for support.

“You sick?” Rose said, remembering Johnny reporting that Magdalena wasn’t going skating this afternoon, the norm for months.

Magdalena shook her head. She wrapped herself in her arms and sat on the stairs. Her bony knees peeked up from under her skirt. She tossed her head and her silky locks swung and draped her back, ready for Rose to go to work.

She settled on the crooked step behind her daughter, the fresh odor of Camay and Breck shampoo wafting up as Rose lifted Magdalena’s chestnut hair.

Magdalena sighed and scowled over her shoulder, silently warning Rose to speed it up. But, Rose loved these moments, the opportunities she had to touch her daughter—do her hair, help her dress, button a blouse. Once Magdalena barreled into her teens, she had careened right past Rose, with barely a look back.

Rose had tried to forge a close relationship, create that happy friendship she saw some mothers and daughters share. Rose had to settle for the reassurance she was raising her daughter right and giving her opportunities to have a life, a career without money-worries. Rose had nothing in the way of a stable beginning to life. Luckily she’d had nursing to fill the gap left by her childhood, the craggy hole that remained after Rose trusted people she shouldn’t have.

Rose shuddered. Growing up in an orphanage left her with painful memories so deep they’d shock her, and surface with a sight or smell or a feeling and invoke something she’d forgotten. But in being a good mother to Magdalena and Johnny, she had thought she could heal her past pain, her past sins.

At the very least she could be vigilant about how her children looked and dressed. Rose knew what it was like to be clad in tattered clothes with shoes worn through to the pads of her feet. She knew what that did to a person’s soul. She understood the value of dressing well, and it wasn’t about shallow expressions of wealth. A girl’s appearance was the quickest way to send the message about herself, who she wanted to be or thought she was already.

Only on the days when the orphanage was expecting nervous, fashionable couples, looking for a child to adopt, did someone touch Rose in anyway remotely nurturing. Those days the women at the orphanage would do Rose’s hair. But it wasn’t a loving gesture, more of a yanking, the sound of a comb thwacking through knots as Rose’s head snapped back and forth with the grooming. The memory of it made Rose shudder.

Rose treated Magdalena’s grooming as an act of love. She’d never tugged Magdalena’s hair. She cherished every quiet moment with the comb she had.

Rose’s eyes began to burn at the thought of Isabella and her infant daughter. They would never have these moments. Rose would never say it out loud, but if not for Ian being without Isabella now; Rose thought it was better both mother and daughter died at the same time. To live without your baby. Rose’s eyes filled. She knew what that meant. She couldn’t start thinking about that. She didn’t have the time to feel something so raw.

“Mum? How old were you when you got married?”

“Twenty.”

Rose put the brush in her mouth and ran her fingers through Magdalena’s locks, remembering the picture of her and Henry on the baseball field, getting married at Forbes Field on the pitcher’s mound, that photo in Life Magazine, showing her as happy as she’d ever been.

Rose ran the brush back through Magdalena’s hair. “That day was spectacular. Wow, that sun. We don’t get sun like that often. Fat and yellow as can be.” Rose wrapped the gum band around the hair and gently pulled Magdalena to standing with a sigh.

“Why?” Rose said.

“No reason.”

Rose wondered if everyone was bizarre today on purpose or if they just couldn’t help it.

Magdalena looked over her shoulder at Rose. “Daddy’s perfect. I want a man just like him.”

Rose raised her chin at her seventeen-year-old daughter trying to see inside her soul. What did she really want to know with this line of questioning?

Rose put the brush into her robe pocket.

“You’re not worried about that bullshit are you? Boys? Pal around with the gang all you want, go roller skating with Susan and the Delany boys and so forth, but there’s no time for complicated love bullshit, right now.”

Magdalena stiffened and drew away.

Rose recalled her conversation with Johnny. “Wait, but you’re not going skating today? Johnny told me. You sick?”

Magdalena shrugged and put her hands on hip, chin in the air, and for a second Rose saw every bit of who she was in her daughter.

Magdalena blew out her air as though she’d just been told to clean up Unk’s waste. “Can’t a person be under the weather in her own house without the community nurse taking her temperature every five seconds? It’s this test I have. I really want that scholarship. Okay?”

Rose was relieved by Magdalena’s words and she gathered her into a suffocating hug. Rose believed she would be able to feel any real trouble coursing through Magdalena’s veins if she just held her tight enough.

Magdalena went stiff and tried to pull away. Rose gripped harder, until the girl had no choice but to embrace Rose back. Rose felt her daughter’s arms slide around her back and she laid her head on Rose’s shoulder.

“I’m proud of you, Magdalena.”

Magdalena nodded into Rose’s shoulder.

Satisfied, she gripped Magdalena’s shoulders “Okay, move it,” Rose said, “Lots to do, right? Just remember you can do anything you set your mind to, Magdalena. There are no limits on your future. None.”

Rose patted Magdalena’s back, spun her toward the kitchen and smacked her on the behind as though sending a horse out to pasture.

Magdalena looked over her shoulder, face twisted up with confusion before she disappeared into the kitchen.

Rose never had to worry about Magdalena being a wayward sort—a poor decision maker. No, Magdalena had everything Rose never did. No black holes marring her soul.

She’d given Magdalena and Johnny all the love and security they needed to grow up and make the right decisions. She didn’t have to waste her time wondering if they were okay. And that was as comforting as anything to Rose.

* * *

Rose stood just outside the kitchen doorway. She leaned against the wall, gripped by exhaustion, remembering she had only slept a few hours before she’d been called out to the Greshecky’s to deliver Isabella’s baby. She could hear her family, the lot of them, gathered in the kitchen. At that moment, she wished they would all disappear and she could go about her business without interference.

Rose grimaced. She wanted to obliterate that awful thought, but it was there to stay. She prayed for peace and the ability to be content with what she had, this family. But, she and Henry had worked hard to put money away for a nice family of four to purchase a home. It seemed so simple. Save more than you spend. Reasonable. Especially when both parents did work.

Yet, there was still no house for the Pavlesics. Not when family members needed to borrow from their savings, or stole it. Or gambled it away. Because family staying together in the hopes of making a better life took precedence over everything.

The Pavlesics lived enmeshed like prickly strands of hemp, twined together, abrasive, but strong from one end of the rope to the other. The rope may have been strained from the hemorrhaging of their joint bank accounts, or by petty arguments and useless jealousy, but it was as stable as it needed to be. The damage wasn’t even noticeable from certain angles, or over time.

Rose told herself to toughen up. She should go to her family, to Henry for comfort. But she had never been able to verbalize her feelings as she wished she could. She was grateful for Henry and the family he’d given her by marriage, but still, even with them seven feet away she felt alone in every way.

The steady hum of conversation, punctuated by Buzzy’s guffaws and expressions of “you don’t say!” kept Rose from moving. She couldn’t shake the heaviness in her chest. She took a deep breath and exhaled as she peered around the wall.

The family sat sausaged at a table intended for six, shoulder jostling shoulder, squeezed so tight that Rose often let the coal go low during the course of a meal for all the warmth generated by sheer body heat and a hot argument. Buzzy’s and Sara Clara’s child, Leo, and Johnny and Magdalena sat along one side of the beat-up Formica table.

Auntie Anna, an elephantine white-haired woman sat at the far end of the table, grinning at Leo. She fingered the leather strings around her neck that held her bulging suede sack of cash between her shapeless breasts. Unk was at the end closest to the stove, rubbing his temples, lost in his thoughts or simply confused by the banter.

Sara Clara’s wide smile and cheerful expression was in full force. She was clearly over her earlier mood or faking it so no one besides Rose would know of her melancholy. Her neat figure was made more alluring by jeans, showcasing her long, trim legs, and a form-fitting, coral cardigan pushed her breasts out over the table as though Isaly’s had purchased advertising there and demanded Sara Clara make a sale that very breakfast.

The picture-perfect twenty-three year-old sat cinched between Henry and Buzzy. Sara Clara’s wavy hair, silky as exquisite Japanese threads, was gathered in a ponytail and made her appear sophisticated; the same hairstyle made Magdalena look innocent.

Rose shifted her weight and fussed with her hair, pushing strays back in place, squeezing her bun, a jumbled mess after a long night. She’d been too busy to shower and observing Sara Clara prompted a surge of envy. Sara Clara did nothing to help out at home, but always looked stunning for her job of Queen Do Nothing All Day.

Sara Clara’s purring at Henry made Rose cringe. The woman-child bestowed all her attention on Henry, every blessed day, probing him for stories about his days as a Pittsburgh Pirate.

Rose sighed at Sara Clara forcing Henry to relive the best and worst stretch of his life as though it were her story, too. It called up too much emotion for Henry and it unnerved Rose. The exercise excited Sara Clara, satisfied with the stories of another life rather than having her own.

“No, why of course, I understand the decision to go to the Pirates instead of accepting that chemistry scholarship,” Sara Clara said, and swept her petite, manicured hand over Henry’s forearm, resting above his wrist. “But Henry,
realllllly
a Pittsburgh Pirate. What tales you have to tell!”

Rose was pleased to see Henry worm his arm away and run his hand through his hair. She hadn’t realized she groaned in response to Sara Clara’s inquisition until the whole family turned toward her. She moved quickly to kiss Auntie Anna good morning, and saw the family’s plates were empty. No one had served the food. Like always, they waited for her.

“I ain’t
hungry
,” Auntie Anna growled at Rose. “Gonna count the money n’at. Think we’re ‘bout flush for that house you been talking about building.” Auntie Anna pulled her money pouch—the one she never removed unless Rose was forcing her to bathe, or was checking her for repeated bouts of pneumonia, or adding more money.

Rose spoke to Auntie as though soothing a wild animal, tucking the sour smelling sack back into Auntie’s shirt, telling her that they would certainly count the money on pay day—Friday. Rose had been depositing funds into the bank on behalf of her family, but still gave a portion to Auntie Anna, as was the tradition for all of them. Rose would have liked to put all their pay in the bank to make sure it grew at the rate it ought to, but it wasn’t Rose’s home and despite Auntie Anna’s diminished abilities, no one was ready to take the last scrap of her dignity. Besides, from the lessons learned in 1929, Auntie Anna was as safe a bank as Mellon at the bottom of the hill.