Magnolia City (29 page)

But soon she was over a month late. There was a feeling inside she couldn’t ignore, the languor of new life. She began taking naps in the afternoon. Her face changed. A trip to Nella’s doctor confirmed her fears. She told Lamar before she told Garret. He didn’t take it the way she’d hoped he would. His voice grew cold over the phone.

“You slept with Garret?”

“We’re married, Lam. I sleep with him every night.”

“You wanted me to break up with Char and you slept with Garret?”

“You
haven’t
broken up with Char. It’s been weeks, and you just keep talking about it.”

“But you wanted me to.”

“Are you still going to do it?”

“Well, not now.”

A long pause stretched out over the telephone lines. In her other ear, the radiant heater sputtered like it wasn’t putting out enough heat. The guarded tone in Lamar’s voice gave her a chill. “Think about what you’ve done here, woman—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“For God’s sake! Now
he’ll
be the father of your children, not me.”

“Lamar, listen—”

But he didn’t listen. He hung up on her and never called back. She knew what to expect next and, right on cue, it came: the news of Lamar’s betrothal to her sister. There would be a long engagement, no doubt, leading up to a grim Protestant ritual.
If that’s what Lamar wants, he can just stew in his own juice. See if I care.
Hetty tried to exile him from her mind. But then one day she opened the
Houston Post-Dispatch
to the Society Column and was stunned by what she read: RUSK/ALLEN NUPTIALS SET FOR JUNE. They were to be married in less than three months! She wrote in her passbook under
Withdrawals: Lamar’s love.

The wedding itself was a series of small shocks for Hetty. She and Garret arrived at Christ Church at four p.m. on a hot June afternoon, presenting their card of admission in the vestibule. As they were escorted down the aisle, Hetty saw instantly that Garret was underdressed. He’d worn his best double-breasted pinstripe, but all the other men sported cutaways and spats. Everyone watched them as they approached the pew where her parents were sitting. Heat rose into Hetty’s cheeks with a fury. She felt huge now, her feet so swollen she had to wear chunky shoes that tied. She kept her eyes down and tripped as she tried to sidle into her seat. The sight of Nella reminded her that the Spanish use the word
embarazada
for pregnant. Suddenly she understood why. She sat down and turned her back to the congregation, but could hear whispering behind her, imagining that people were commenting not only on her husband’s attire, but on her less-than-fashionable maternity outfit.
Lockett should be happy,
Hetty thought.
Now we do look like shanty Irish.

As Cora had foretold, once Hetty was with child, Nella forgave her for eloping with Garret. She was overwhelmed with a torrent of attention such as she’d never known. Nella threw her a shower in the suite at the Warwick, inviting all her debutante girlfriends. She received so many gifts, she had to store them in the garage underneath their apartment. Nella bought her new maternity clothes, paid her doctor bills, and insisted that Lina come to comfort her through the long hours of labor. Hetty’s water broke right on schedule one evening in October as a huge harvest moon glided into the somber sky. Everything looked ghostly on the streets as Garret drove her to St. Joseph’s. When he turned toward the hospital, she saw a sign drift by in the gloom: Pierce Street. He lifted her into a wheelchair at the entrance. As a nurse wheeled her down the antiseptic white hallways, she looked toward the windows for a glimpse of the moon: It had lost its golden color but still rode huge in the night sky. Hetty fancied that its pull had ruptured her waters, like the tides it towed out to sea every night.

Lina came into her hospital room later and pulled down the blind. “Don’t gaze at the moon,
m’ija
—you’ll give birth to a sleepwalker!”

Time passed. Hetty wasn’t sure how long. She couldn’t get comfortable; she was beginning to sweat. Even through the drawn blinds, she felt the moon drawing her behind it as it inched along. She could hardly keep from crying out at times when the pains cramped her up and she couldn’t stop them. She felt slightly delirious and had trouble concentrating on anything. She just tried to endure.

Lina propped her legs up with pillows and stroked her knees. Hetty whispered, “Have you ever seen Mamá’s knees?”

“Sí,”
came a whispered response.

“What’s on them?”

“Cicatrices.”

Scars,
Hetty thought, knife blades flashing in her mind. “From what?”

Lina grew silent. “That happened in San Antonio. Ask Cora.”

Hetty hoped she would remember to do that. Right now, she felt trapped in an undertow of pain that crested into huge waves sweeping her away. Then something seemed to go wrong. The labor pains were coming fast now. Hetty was delirious with them, moaning and clutching at the pillows. Nurses stood over her, shaking their heads, asking questions. She felt fingers inside her, stretching her.

Lina came and sat on the bed beside her, trying not to look concerned. “
No te preocupes, m’ija,
but the baby’s feet are coming down first.”

“Just hurry up and get it out!”

“
No podemos, m’ija.
The head has to come down.”

Contractions strangled Hetty so she couldn’t breathe. No one had prepared her for this kind of torment. She remembered the injection she’d read about that was so popular at hospitals. “Twilight sleep!” she screamed. “I want twilight sleep! Lina!”

Next thing she knew, she was being lifted onto a stretcher and felt cold air passing as she was carried through hallways. When she finally felt the prick of a needle in her arm, the pain didn’t go away all at once. It took a while. “Just wait, miss,” some nurse told her. An eternity of torment passed until the pain started fading slowly like music getting softer and softer until she could hear it no longer. There was only white noise all around until a red balloon floated up into the sky and she was gone.

When she woke, the pain was back, deeper and sharper. A baby was screeching nearby. She groaned and looked around the gray room. In a shaft of afternoon sun, Garret paced back and forth holding a bundle in his arms.

“It’s finally out?” she asked.

“You had a Cesarean.”

“That’s why my stomach hurts so much. What flavor is it?”

He came over to the bed and raised the infant proudly. The child’s face was a tangle of discomfort, red and bawling. “It’s a boy. What shall we call it?”

Hetty remembered the street sign she’d glimpsed on the way to the hospital. “Pierce,” she said, reaching up. “Let’s call him Pierce.”

W
hile Hetty was in the hospital, time went out of focus. Light and dark drifted in and out of her window, hazy in the ebbing of twilight sleep. Gray clouds dusted the sky. She kept the curtains drawn all the way back, watching for a flash of lightning, listening for a drumroll of thunder. Anything to sweep away the gloom. It wasn’t that she was lonely. St. Joseph’s Infirmary crawled with efficient nurses anxious to tutor her in the intricacies of childcare. Visitors appeared almost daily to snap her out of her daze: Nella and Lina, her friends one by one, Garret dropping in after work with a warm fragrant bag of Chinese food. Kirb came by one night after batching up the bank. He seemed delighted to have a grandson to carry on the Allen line. He even called her princess again. To her surprise, Charlotte actually visited twice, holding Pierce proudly and confessing how much she wanted one of her own. Hetty sat up on mounds of pillows and radiated the glow of motherhood. But after visiting hours, when they brought the baby in, she held him away from her. His crying and helplessness only depressed her. She longed for someone to come and take care of the child so she could sleep. But she didn’t dare ask. She could feel her throat tighten up just at the thought. Her secret sadness was like the scar that had disfigured her belly: She showed it to no one.

The day Garret took her home, Pearl came over and helped them settle in. They set up the crib, hauled out the diaper pail, and unpacked some of the baby blankets she’d been given as gifts. When she opened the GE and saw that Pearl had stocked it with food—a meat loaf and a whole ham, a bowl of potato salad, and a gallon of refrigerator slaw—she choked up. That would happen to her a lot in the days to come. She would cry at the slightest nudge, sometimes from joy, usually from a piercing but unidentifiable distress.

The following Saturday, fierce cries fished Hetty out of a deep afternoon nap. She had fallen asleep breast-feeding Pierce on the chaise lounge. He was having one of his rare fits of colic during the day. She tried feeding him, but he wanted nothing to do with her nipple. She changed his diaper, tossing the soiled one into the already overflowing pail that she hadn’t had the energy to empty. The whole apartment reeked from it. Hetty settled into the rocker, seesawing the baby in her arms. He cried all the louder. She stood up and heaved him to her shoulder, wincing at the pain in her abdomen. His howls scorched the close air of the apartment, making her cheeks burn. She swore under her breath and stomped into the bedroom. She set the baby in his cradle and ordered him to go to sleep. That enraged him all the more. His face was beet red.

“If you don’t stop that right now, I’m going to start screaming, too.” And she did. She started screaming back at him, pitching her voice louder than his, appalled at what she heard herself saying. “You think YOU have something to scream about? YOU? Because of you I have this horrible scar—my nipples aren’t even pink anymore. They’re dark brown!
Do you hear me?!
Dark brown! Now—
YOU!
—won’t even sleep when you’re supposed to. Well—
YOU!
—can just stew in your own juice—see if I care!”

Trembling, she went outside and sat on the rickety stairs, a Lucky hanging defiantly out of one corner of her mouth. The baby screams weren’t as loud out here. She smoked the cigarette to a nub, then went down into the garage and rifled around in the boxes of gifts for a rattle or pacifier that might distract him. His crying leaked through the ceiling like rancid water. She found his Uncle Wiggily Game, his Magnetic Fish Pond, and a Chick-in-Egg Rattle. She settled on the Steiff barking dog Nella had given him, the one with the natural-looking glass eyes and the baby-size bark. Then she went upstairs and waved it in front of his scrunched-up face. She made it bark. He caught his breath. She placed it in his tiny hand, but he bawled and threw it out of the cradle.

“Fine. Just
FINE!
That was my last offer.” She went into the kitchen and pulled out the bottle of champagne crazy Wini had brought her. She wasn’t supposed to drink while she was nursing—they told her at the hospital—but she didn’t care anymore.
Let the little bastard drink champagne straight from my tits—maybe that’ll knock him out.

Then inexplicably, the squall blew itself out as suddenly as it had begun. Silence pounded at her ears. She tiptoed into the bedroom and peered into the crib. Pierce had fallen into a ragged sleep, his breathing shallow, his face forlorn. Hetty clutched at her throat and went over to the phone.

“Pearl,” she whispered into the receiver, hoarse from screaming, “something awful happened with the baby.” She confessed what she’d been afraid to tell anyone, that she hadn’t wanted the baby in the first place and now was leaving it abandoned in its crib to cry its eyes out. “Him, I guess I should say,” realizing that she’d been referring to Pierce as “it.”

The receiver crackled with laughter. “You just got the baby blues, hon. I went through the same thing.”

“You had a baby? You never told me that.”

“Like to run me crazy. We lived in a fourth-floor walk-up when my Little Pearl was born, and there was a fire escape outside our window. I kept looking at that window, thinking I’d step out there and drop the baby off the fire escape.”

The big lump in Hetty’s throat found its way into her eyes. “I thought you’d report me, and they’d come take my baby away from me,” she said, tears dribbling down her cheeks.

“Aren’t you the one!” Pearl said, clucking. “There’s a mother in you somewhere—y’all just need to dig down and find her.”

Sunday morning the sun managed to work a chink in the cloud cover. Hetty was awakened by sunlight on her face for the first time in weeks. Sleep floated around her like chiffon scarves. She stretched in slow ripples and realized that she’d actually slept through the night. Pierce hadn’t wakened once. She unbuttoned her nightie and let the golden sunlight flow over her engorged breasts like warm oil. It made her milk come in. She could smell Garret on the sheets but couldn’t see him anywhere. He would enjoy the sight of her naked in the sun. They hadn’t made love in so long, the poor guy must be desperate. He’d probably gone down to the corner newsstand to get the Sunday paper. In his undershirt, no doubt. She couldn’t break him of that habit. She also couldn’t convince him to pick up the
Post-Dispatch
so she could read about her friends. He always got the
Chronicle
for the oil news. Hetty heard tiny sounds coming from the crib and rolled over to lift Pierce out and pull him to her breast.

She was almost asleep again when a stampede of footsteps shook the stairs. Garret busted in shouting, “I was right, goddamn it! I was right.”

She could hear him slap his hat down before he came in. Sure enough, he was wearing his sleeveless undershirt. He hoisted the Sunday paper with one muscled arm like he was waving a letter. It would take two hands for Hetty to pick it up. He slammed it down on the bed and dangled the front page in front of her eyes. “Look at this,” he said. Huge block letters blared out the headline EAST TEX WELL A GUSHER! Then in smaller letters:
Dad Joiner hits pay dirt in Rusk County.

“What?” Hetty pulled herself out of the snuggle with the baby—who had dozed off—and sat up in bed, yanking the section out of her husband’s hands. Garret hovered above, waiting for her reaction. Her lips moved as her eyes sped along the lines:

Hetty looked up. “Old Dad did it?”

Garret yelped, “Yes!” and slammed his fist into the air, dancing about to a chorus of yahoos. “I knew it! I just knew it!”

“Shhhh! You’ll wake the baby.” But it was too late. Pierce was startled by the tremors rumbling across the floor. She lifted him up to Garret. “Here, do diaper duty while I read on.”

Garret sang to his son as he struggled with the safety pins: “Daisy Bradford had a farm . . .” Hetty scanned the front page again—the letters were huge, the kind they save for announcements of war or the first flight across the Atlantic: JOINER, HERO OF THE HOUR.

Hetty could almost smell the rich deposit, then realized it was the baby poo from the diaper Garret had just peeled off. He went into the bathroom to retrieve a wet washcloth. Hetty pulled her nightie back on. “So it
is
the Woodbine Sand?” she asked as he came back out.

“Yes, sir! Exactly like I said. Now maybe your goddamn father will believe me.”

Hetty watched her husband swaddling their child in layers of white cotton. She’d never realized how sexy it could be to watch a grown man changing a baby. The thick fingers fumbling with safety pins, the darkly tanned arms cradling the soft white flesh. Garret, always fit, was now strapping from hauling pipes and breaking joints eight hours a day. He bent over Pierce in a pool of sun, a new light of confidence around his head. Her legs stirred with desire for the first time in months.

“So you’d better pack your bags, Hetty,” he said, lifting his son into the air with one hand as easily as the newspaper, “because we’re going to East Texas.”

“Of course we are, kiddo,” Hetty said, lying back and letting her enormous breasts fall out of her nightie. “But first—come here.”

All through the holidays that year, Garret planned his invasion of East Texas. He crawled over maps of the region like an ant, surveying the dimensions of Joiner’s lease, wondering where their one-acre share might be. “We’ve got to get up there,” he’d tell Hetty, twisting a Camel in his fingers and dogging her to call her father.

Hetty decided she’d better put in an appearance at Nella’s Christmas party, cradling Pierce in her arms and wearing a sweater that showcased her bust line. Lamar noticed it at once, steering his new wife over to where Hetty sat on the sofa. Charlotte wore a mysterious smile.

“You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,” Hetty said. “You’re not . . . ?”

“Yes!” she squealed, breaking out into a broad grin.

Hetty squealed back. “When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” Lamar said, trying not to be too obvious about eyeing Hetty’s abundant breasts.

Charlotte slapped him on the head. “We’re due in July.”

“I’m sure Rachel will be happy,” Hetty said. “She finally gets that Rusk heir she’s been waiting for.” A swarm of elegant guests eddied around them in Nella’s drawing room. Charlotte sat down beside Hetty and looked at Pierce longingly. “Would you like to hold him, sis?”

“May I? I have to practice.” Hetty slid the baby into her arms.

“Ohh, sugar, come to your aunt Char,” she cooed, her cool demeanor completely disarmed by the little pink face surrounded by its creamy bunting. When Pierce smiled at her, she got a little teary-eyed and gazed at him in a kind of rapture. “If I had one of these, I’d never put it down.” She sighed.

“Well, you’ll have one soon. And by the way, it’s not an it.” Hetty laughed. “They do have genders.”

“Sorry, him. You must be so in love, Het.”

“In love? Wait till you have to change a diaper.”

She rocked Pierce back and forth. “But it’s that sweet-smelling baby poo, isn’t it?” she crooned.

“I hope to tell you!” Hetty said. “See what you have to look forward to, Lam?”

“I’ve already made a deal with Tuggie,” Lamar said. “No diapers.” They all laughed, even Pierce.

Hetty leaned over to watch the baby giggling. She slipped her arm around Charlotte and hugged her ever so slightly. She was not rebuffed.
A rare moment of closeness!
she thought.
Maybe becoming mothers will finally turn us into sisters
.

Charlotte wouldn’t give the child up until their father came over and demanded equal time. Cora had been right: Pierce was proving to be Hetty’s entrée back into the family circle. She watched as Kirb’s face melted into grandfatherly smiles. The child worked his simple alchemy.

Hetty waited for Charlotte and Lamar to be drawn into the festive crowd, then leaned closer. “Well, Dad, I guess you’ve heard about the Daisy Bradford.”

“I know what you’re going to say next.”

“I’ll try not to rub it in too much.”

“There’s nothing to rub in,” he said, cooing to the child.

“Dad! Why can’t you swallow your pride and admit that Garret was right?”