House of Spells (8 page)

There are two telephones in our house: one in the bedroom on the nightstand by my parent’s bed where Rose held her child, one in the kitchen. My mother went into the kitchen to call Mr. Giacomo, closing the bedroom door behind her.

Rose kissed her baby.

“It’s like kissing a stranger,” she said. He was just staring at her. She moved her head around and he followed her with his eyes.

She closed hers. Her lips were pale with shadows underneath them. Her breath quietened and her hand gripped mine suddenly, then relaxed. The baby on her chest wrinkled his lips, curled his toes that were sticking out from under the towel.

“Don’t fall asleep, Rose,” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here,” a cold grief that I didn’t understand pooling in my belly. I wanted to carry her away from there, the two of them.

My mother returned with towels, a bowl of warm water, and a handheld scale to weigh the baby. When she laid him out on a towel to wash him, he started screaming. After she’d toweled him dry, she asked Rose, “Do you want to hold him again?”

She put the baby in Rose’s arms and he stopped crying right away. I didn’t know that a baby could recognize its mother just by smelling her, just by knowing it’s her and no one else. I hadn’t been to many births, just two.

Rose unwrapped the towel to count his fingers and toes. She checked his ears, the shape of his head. He was normal, looked normal.

“He’s cute,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

I nodded, touched his little fingers that curled warm and surprisingly strong around mine.

We heard the front door close, the clatter of boots in the foyer. Mr. Giacomo was outside in the kitchen. My mother went out to greet him.

She brought him in, and he made a point of not getting too close. He waited till my mother asked if he wanted to hold the baby and he nodded, went to sit in the rocking chair by the window.

It looked like he couldn’t quite believe what he had in his arms. I could tell he’d never held a baby before. My mother had to show him how to nestle its head in the crook of his elbow, and it just stared up at him, wide-eyed and quiet.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll look after you.”

“You’ll have a good life with us,” he went on, looking down at the baby. “You’ll see the house I’ve bought for us.”

Your window is on the south side. You can see the river from there. We’re planting a lawn where you can play.

“My wife wants to meet you. She doesn’t believe you’re real yet, and she’s waiting to greet you.”

Sure she wasn’t there; she didn’t want to see my mom.

He was talking as if the rest of us were not in the room, as if we’d already left.

My mother was gathering up the stained blankets from the floor, lingering there. She kept her back to Rose and Mr. Giacomo, listening but not turning round so I could see her face. I wanted to clap my hands to turn her around. I wanted to know how she felt.

I squeezed Rose’s hand hard to make her do something.

Rose watched Mr. Giacomo for about another minute. He didn’t once look at her. He was smiling at the baby.

“You’ll like your life with us,” he said. “You’ll have a good life.”

“Will I get to see him?” Rose asked.

He didn’t answer. Even then, he kept looking at the baby, but he looked startled by her question, as if it had never occurred to him.

Rose sat up. “I’m about to lose everything I’ve always wanted. That just hit me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know I’d feel this way.”

She drew back the blankets, wincing. In her nightdress she turned on her bottom, swinging her legs over the floor. Before she could stand up, my mother put her hands on her shoulders, saying, “Lie down. You’ll tear your stitches.”

“No!” Rose shouted, shrugging off my mother’s hands.

She got out of bed and stood in front of Mr. Giacomo. “Okay, give him back.”

Mr. Giacomo looked up at her, his eyes full of amazement. But she wouldn’t go away, she just stood there in front of him.

After a minute, his face as pale as a whitewashed wall, Mr. Giacomo gave her the baby.

“I’ll let you rest,” he said. He touched the corners of his eyes; he looked bewildered, almost ashamed.

My father called then, to ask how Rose was doing. I picked up the phone by the bedside as soon as I heard it ring. I heard him say, “Congratulations!” Then he asked to speak to my mother and she went out into the kitchen, to pick up the other phone.

“You hang up when you hear me on the line,” she said; and Mr. Giacomo followed her out.

I sensed she didn’t want me or Rose to hear what she had to say to my father; her lips were tight and she had that determined look she always wore when she anticipated an argument.

Late the next night, Rose came into my room to wake me up.

“Are you going to help me pack?” she asked me. “It’s time to go.”

“Yes,” I nodded, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

“Hurry,” she said, a false cheeriness in her voice. “I don’t want to be out there in the kitchen by myself.”

“I’ll get dressed,” and climbed out of bed.

“You’re my friend, right?”

“Yes I am, Rose,” I said. “I’ll be there in a second.”

In the kitchen, Rose showed me the bag she’d packed with dried peaches, provolone, and a cold omelet wrapped in butcher paper. “Train food is expensive,” she told me, widening her eyes. She walked slowly back and forth, the click of fastened suitcase locks.

My mother got me to sit cross-legged on a chair and she laid the baby across my lap.

“That’s Mr. Giacomo at the door,” she said, and she went out.

The baby’s breath smelled like watermelon.

What’s this in my lap? His eyes followed my finger: Hey, little fellow. It felt like he was waiting for me to do something, quiet. Maybe take him out and show him the village, introduce him to folks. He had the curious look of someone who wants to be shown around. Sometimes hikers climb to my cabin, amazed to find it here, amazed to find a girl so young living alone. I invite them in. I feel cautious, but the Forest Service expects me to welcome visitors. They touch the fire finder, finger the lace ruffle on my pillow case, touch the washed plate by the sink, touch my little row of books on the south sill, turn to look at all the landscape through the wide windows. And often they say nothing, then they thank me and they go.

I watched Rose spread the snowsuit my mother had found for her on the chrome-legged table. The metal zipper that she opened made the sound of an angry hummingbird. There was a sack for the newborn’s legs and a hood of two pink ears.

In the bedroom, before she fell asleep for the second time, we’d talked about where she was going. She was going to Field, the next stop on the train into the mountains, and she thought she might find work there. A cousin who worked in the hotel up there had said he’d help her out.

“What if you don’t like it in Field?” I’d asked.

“We’re not going to
stay
there,” she smiled.

“We’ll come back when it’s okay to come back.”

Now she opened her blouse, the child’s greedy, wrinkled mouth at her dark nipple. “It’s time to go,” she said, but she still sat there as if listening, her blouse open.

Mr. Giacomo came into the kitchen. He looked away when he saw Rose breast-feeding. He asked whether the baby was healthy, and my mother, who had followed him in, nodded.

“I can do nothing more,” she said, gazing at him.

He gave her a scared, little smile, as if to say, “Once again you’ve failed us.”

And he said, looking at my mother and then at Rose, “Well, thank you for everything you’ve done.”

Yet I could see him ask himself, What mistakes have
I
made, that have led me here? The crinkles at his eyes had deepened and paled with shame.

My father had walked up from the one vat mill. I could hear him kicking snow off his boots in the foyer.

When he came into the kitchen, rubbing his hands that were inflamed from the cold water in the pulp vat, Mr. Giacomo turned to go.

“On your way then, John?” my father asked.

“Yes,” he nodded.

“Come to say goodbye?”

“Yes,” he nodded again.

“How’s that house of yours coming along, the one down by the river?”

“I haven’t been there in awhile.”

“Not here to change Rose’s mind, I hope?”

My father went over to the kitchen sink to run warm water over his hands, his shoulders tight with anger. “You’re not a man to respect other people’s needs,” he said then.

Mr. Giacomo looked puzzled, almost frightened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Look,” he went on, “I’m only here to help. You don’t have a car to take Rose to the station. Take the taxi,” laying the keys on the table. “I can walk home from here.”

“Thank you,” he said to Rose again. “Thank you for considering our offer.” He bowed slightly to her and then he turned and walked out of the kitchen without looking at my parents.

When we left the yard in Johnny’s taxi, the Columbia Avenue streetlights had come on. There was the Giacomo café, the shades pulled. I watched the snow drift under the streetlamps and gather in the corners of the darkened avenue windows. Rose was quiet. Usually she would be chatting on about this or that. She didn’t turn round to look at me. She was holding herself still with the newborn in her lap, not looking to the right or left, absorbed by the street ahead.

My father called this taxi “the boat.”

“I’m taking you to the train in a boat!” he said. He didn’t want to say, “I’m taking you to the train in Johnny’s taxi.” I could feel he didn’t want to acknowledge a debt to Mr. Giacomo, however small.

That 1964 Chevrolet convertible felt like a river scow, solid and slow. Now my father was turning up 2nd Street towards the tracks, taking the hill in a wide arc, hands climbing on the wheel as he leaned to the left to make the car more stable.

We passed by high-peaked houses with darkened verandas. I knew who lived in those 2nd Street houses, in every one. The Camozzis and the Sandezs, the Staglianos and the one-armed yard worker Danny Ote. I knew their lives, their memories; I’d known them for as long as I could remember. I felt held by those memories, held where I belonged. In our village, I knew I’d be cared for when the time came for me to be cared for. That’s what Rose didn’t have, and that’s what she was looking for, I felt, starting with that baby in her arms.

Then I realized that Mr. Giacomo didn’t have the feeling of being welcome in our village either, though he and his wife have lived here for many years. It’s hard to say how I knew this. There was a wary deference in the way people chatted with him in the street or in his café. Everyone called him Mr. Giacomo.

While Rose went into the lit-up station to buy tickets, my father carried her suitcases to the platform. I saw her under the yellow light of the station’s tall windows, walking to the double doors that let out a vapour when they opened. I could hear the squeak of her suede boots in the new snow while she tried to walk in a normal, unaffected way. Carrying the newborn wrapped in a blanket, she stumbled once, tripped over her own feet.

My father gave me a twenty dollar bill. “Sweetheart, you look after her,” he said. “Help her get settled.” He wrote our phone number under the chin of the queen as if he thought that, once out of town, I’d never be able to remember it, then folded the bill twice before my eyes and drew my sleepy, half-frozen fingers out of my coat sleeve to close them over the folded bill.