Give Me Your Heart (20 page)

Yet no matter his mental age, which seemed to oscillate wildly, John Henry exercised the tact of an adult, thanking his mother profusely for the “supplies” she brought him,
unwrapped, in a Sears shopping bag: socks with reinforced toes and heels, thick cotton underwear, flannel pajamas, khaki work trousers, a coarse-knit sweater too small for John Henry’s
stooped, muscular shoulders. Some of these items didn’t appear to be new purchases but appeared secondhand, worn or even soiled; Lizabeta wondered if her sister-in-law, a nurse’s aide
at the Sparta hospital, pilfered them from the rooms of patients who’d left them behind or had died. But John Henry never betrayed the slightest disappointment with his mother’s gifts,
thanking Ma
ma
and trying to hug her around the neck and kiss her cheek even as Dorothy chided him for God’s sake not to “squeeze the life out” of her.

Lizabeta, who adored her young children and was anxious for their well-being virtually every minute of her waking life, could not comprehend her sister-in-law’s cruelty to her own son.
Seeing Lizabeta’s face, Dorothy said to her, smirking, “If you had a special case like John Henry, you’d know how it is.”

Lizabeta thought no, she would not. She could not imagine behaving in such a way with any child of hers.

Lizabeta was never easy in her sister-in-law’s presence, as she was never easy in the presence of any of her husband’s family. Elderly Mrs. Braam thought nothing, in her rambling
monologues, of comparing her son’s “new wife” to Esther, who’d been a “saint,” and even the grown boys, Calvin and Daniel, who were polite to Lizabeta, seemed
frequently to be exchanging glances in her presence as if amused by her, or scornful. Dorothy, who was critical of all of the family, including even her brother Walter, was given to telling
Lizabeta, in a pretense of sisterly intimacy, as if she couldn’t confide in any of the others, “Just hope that someday God doesn’t pull the same trick on you, Lizzie.”
(“Lizzie” was the pretense, Lizabeta knew. But she smiled weakly, to acquiesce.) “It’s a man’s world,” Dorothy continued, with her angry wincing laugh.
“Hank Chrisman, the boy’s father—
he
walked out.
He
keeps his distance. Can’t blame him, eh?”

To this Lizabeta had no reply. Blankly she stared at the ashes her sister-in-law was letting spill over the side of the ashtray.

“Well
, you
can’t understand. Only the mother can know.”

Lizabeta felt the rebuke. A hot, heavy flush rose into her face.

Lizabeta had been born with a rosy, smudged mark on the lower right side of her face, so that her cheek had the look of having been slapped. At such times she felt the birthmark burn and darken.
She felt her sister-in-law’s eyes move upon her, bemused.

Walter had told Lizabeta that his oldest sister had been the only girl in the family to leave the Rapids and to train for a job. She’d been a nurse’s aide in Sparta, where
she’d met and married this Chrisman when she was nineteen and had John Henry when she was twenty-two. Chrisman worked for the railroad and was often out of town, and in recent years it
wasn’t clear—for not even Walter wished to ask Dorothy—if the two were still married after more than a decade of living apart. Lizabeta had noted how in his rapid chatter to his
mother, John Henry never asked about his father, or anything about his Ma
ma
’s life in Sparta. Did he lack the mental capacity to imagine Ma
ma
somewhere else? Or had John Henry,
after several years of living in the Rapids, forgotten Sparta?

As Lizabeta was forgetting. And good riddance!

If Calvin and Daniel were in a mood—playful-mean, taunting-teasing—to suggest to John Henry that his father was on his way to the farm, John Henry immediately became excited and
anxious, hunching his shoulders to make himself smaller, shaking his head and whimpering, “Is
not. Is not.”

It seemed clear that John Henry did remember his father. Remembered something about his father. Lizabeta tried to intervene, to assure him that his father was not coming, his cousins were only
teasing.

“Is not. Is not!”

Once an idea got into John Henry’s head, it was difficult to dislodge it. John Henry, usually docile, could become not just frightened but angry like a dog that has been baited, in danger
of snapping, biting.

Only rarely did John Henry scuffle with his cousins. Calvin and Daniel knew better than to seriously torment him. Of course, it was forbidden to tease John Henry at all, in any cruel way to
upset him: if Walter were home, the boys wouldn’t have dared. John Henry liked to be teased gently, as you’d tease a young child to make him laugh, not cry. To make him feel loved, not
mocked.

It was often said by Braam relatives that John Henry wasn’t what the Herkimer County school district had labeled him—“retarded”—but was “just
pretending.” (Why? No one could say.) Some of the Braams even believed, as John Henry seemed to, that he was watched over by a higher power, his “garden angels” or God. The boy
was smart enough in his own way, wasn’t he? But Dorothy didn’t see it this way. Dorothy, who was John Henry’s exasperated Ma
ma
, who’d worked for twenty-five years at
Sparta General Hospital, said bluntly that John Henry was a “birth accident.”

Lizabeta wanted to protest. John Henry, who lived with them, who loved them, a
birth accident!
She hoped that, outside with the chickens, John Henry couldn’t have overheard such a
terrible remark.

Dorothy said smugly,
“You
don’t know, Lizzie. You’d have to be the mother to know.”

The twist of Dorothy’s lips as she uttered the name Lizzie, you could see that she found it faintly comical.

Sometimes, goaded by her sister-in-law’s stiff silence, Dorothy began to speak freely, carelessly. Her coarse face became enlivened. She gave off an odor of yeasty female flesh, something
harshly antiseptic beneath. She moved her hands about, gesturing, her hands that resembled her son’s: large, broad, with long spatulate fingers. Her eyes, like John Henry’s, were pale
blue, and inclined to water. Except Dorothy’s eyes darted about with malicious curiosity while John Henry’s eyes were eager, yearning, hopeful. Where John Henry quivered like a puppy
wanting only to be liked and petted, Dorothy quivered with disdain and a wish not to be touched. As a hospital worker, she’d seen too many “nasty”—“damned
nasty”—things. She told Lizabeta frankly that she’d long ago lost her “respect” for suffering. She’d come to a place where you start to blame people for their
damned bad luck. Sick, dying, miserable people were Dorothy Chrisman’s work; she laughed, saying you’d have to pay her to give a damn about them. When she’d first begun working at
Sparta General, a girl of nineteen who’d never seen anyone die, she’d been brimming over with sympathy, but now she had to bite her tongue not to come out with “So? So what?
What’d you expect from life? Open your eyes.”

Lizabeta laughed nervously, wanting to think that her sister-in-law was joking.

“Every day of my life I thank God that Walter took John Henry in. Else John Henry would be in some state home behind bars.
I
couldn’t keep him. You see John Henry now,
he’s calmed down some—Walter works him like a horse out here, so John Henry can’t get so restless and excitable, the way he was growing up. Not just his brain but his thyroid had
some defect. He’d never sleep through a night, not once. Wandering the house at night talking to angels, and outside in the street and in neighbors’ yards in any weather so they’d
call the police. More times than I could count, John Henry was beat up bad. Scars on his face, you’ve seen them—damn lucky his eye didn’t get put out, kids kicking him. He
wouldn’t be toilet-trained till he was seven or eight. Wouldn’t talk until he was six, and then he wouldn’t shut up. See, John Henry was born after a long labor. Twenty hours and
I was awake for all of it. Trying to get that damn baby out of me, I was screaming and sweating like a hog. It was a forceps delivery—his head got squeezed. There’s a kind of dent in
his head, like at the side, here, where the bone is soft. John Henry will always be the mental age he is, he won’t grow up. Don’t let him get into that rocking he does, back and forth,
side to side, when he’s excited. He can stop himself if he tries. Don’t let him pick at his nose, or stick his fingers in his ears or where he shouldn’t be sticking them, or
scratching, or, you know,” Dorothy said, with a look of distaste, “touching himself. John Henry has been trained about dirty habits—he knows better. His father was the one to
discipline him, before he walked out. John Henry is trained. He knows not to touch other children, not ever.” Dorothy paused. Her words suggested that she thought of John Henry as a child,
not a fully mature young man in his twenties, who towered over her. “What he does in private is his own business. You can’t stop some things. Dirty habits, it’s how boys are. Like
even a trained dog will do what it wants to do if it thinks its master isn’t watching.”

Dorothy, a chain smoker, ground out one of her Chesterfields in a saucer. Lizabeta shuddered, thinking,
She is trying to befriend me. She thinks that I am as cruel as she is.

When Dorothy left that morning, Lizabeta stood stiffly in the doorway and made no move to embrace her. John Henry, waiting outside, tried to hug her and was repelled, and trotted after
Walter’s pickup the full length of the long driveway, waving his arms and crying plaintively, “Bye-bye, Ma
ma!
Bye-bye, Ma
ma!
” until the pickup turned into Braam Road
and disappeared from view.

This was the last visit of Dorothy Chrisman to the Braam farm in the Rapids, in early September 1951.

If he’d never come to live with us. If there might have been some other way.

“He’s here now. He will be living with us now.”

In this way, Walter brought John Henry into their lives. The tall, gangling, shaved-headed boy with his eager smile, eager frightened eyes, gripping an overstuffed, badly worn duffel bag against
his chest, ushered into the kitchen by Walter.

“My sister’s son, John Henry. He’s come to help out on the farm and around the house. He can have the room behind the kitchen.” Walter paused, seeing the look in
Lizabeta’s face of shock, incomprehension. Yet he did not acknowledge the look, for this wasn’t Walter Braam’s way. Calmly he supplied Lizabeta’s name to John Henry,
enunciating his words. “John Henry, this is my wife, Lizabeta. Your aunt.”

Quickly John Henry nodded his strange shaved head, which seemed too small for his body, as if to suggest that this was a fact he knew: “Liz’beta. Aunt.”

Walter corrected him: “Aunt Lizabeta. You will say Aunt Lizabeta.’”

“Aunt Liz’beta.”

John Henry’s voice was as high-pitched as a boy’s. His watery blue eyes were fixed not on Lizabeta’s stained smile but somewhere lower, her heavy breasts or her hard, swelling
belly, which was partly hidden by a ratty cardigan sweater.

At this time Lizabeta was six months pregnant with their second child, and the pregnancy was a difficult one. She moved about dazed and dizzy, and her legs (of which, in her shy way, she’d
been sometimes vain) were popping ugly varicose veins; soon she’d be wearing flesh-colored support hose like the older Braam women. Yet she managed to stammer, “John Henry. Why,
hel
lo.”

Lizabeta’s smile could not have been more forced, pained. She could feel the rosy smudged birthmark on her cheek throbbing with blood. She was thinking that the room behind the kitchen was
mostly a storage room, poorly heated, that contained a ruin of an old iron bedstead and a terribly stained mattress upon which Lizabeta’s elderly father-in-law was said to have died years
before; she would have to prepare it for John Henry, at least minimally, but when? Walter would want supper shortly. He’d spoken to Lizabeta matter-of-factly, but his tone suggested
You
will accept this. You will not question me.

At this time, in March 1948, John Henry was twenty years old but looked both younger and older. His face was boyish and yet nicked, scarred, singed-looking, like the face of a mistreated doll;
his arms and legs were long and spindly, not yet filled out with muscle; he was Walter’s height but slouched his shoulders to make himself smaller, less obtrusive. His hands were unusually
large, paddle-hands, with long fingers and broken nails edged with grime. Lizabeta saw with alarm that John Henry appeared to be covered in a film of grime: the webs of skin between his fingers
were shadowed with grime; grime in creases on his neck, the bony knobs of his wrists. His baggy overalls were stiff with grime. On his badly scuffed workboots were what looked like tar stains. He
smelled of his young male body, eager and rancid. Lizabeta fought a sensation of faintness, thinking,
Another. I’m not strong enough.

She would be, though. She had no choice.

“Is he—what you’d call mentally retarded?”

That night, upstairs in their bedroom, undressing for bed, Lizabeta dared to ask Walter this question. Walter responded with a vague annoyed grunt, neither no nor yes but a signal that he
wasn’t in a mood to answer her questions. Lizabeta persisted. “He isn’t dangerous, is he? He can be trusted around children?” In her flannel nightgown, she stood barefoot
with her weight on her heels; the small of her back ached from the weight of the hard, swelling belly like a melon jutting out before her, which exuded a pulsing heat. Walter stood on the other
side of the bed, his back to Lizabeta, pulling off his white foreman’s shirt, pulling off his undershirt, letting the soiled clothes fall. Trousers Walter took care to lay across the back of
a chair. His shoes were usually placed side by side in front of the chair, where he would sit in the morning to put them on.

It was Walter Braam’s habit to undress in this way, distractedly, as if lost in thought and unaware of what he did, in full confidence that, as the previous, saintly wife, Esther, must
have done, his newer wife, Lizabeta, would pick up after him, shirts and undershirts, shorts and socks, pajamas. It was what a woman did, what Braam women did, one of the easy tasks among others
not so easy. Lizabeta said in a breathy rush of words, as if her anxiety might be alleviated by such information, “He—John Henry—seems very . . . kind. He’s shy with us, but
he made friends with Agnes right away. She was laughing so at him! So I think—I hope . . .”Lizabeta’s voice trailed off tentatively. Walter hadn’t answered her, but Walter
was listening, Lizabeta knew. It was true that at supper, though John Henry had been clumsy and self-conscious with the adults, he’d whispered and laughed with Agnes as if the two were old
friends. It was clear that Agnes adored her strange shaved-headed cousin from Sparta, who, as Agnes’s father had told her in his terse way, had “come to live with us” now.