Terrible Virtue (2 page)

She stepped into the room and started down the aisle between the rows of beds, past Amelia, past Frannie Sawyer, past Charity Gaines, who did a fake swoon of relief behind Miss Fletcher's back. She stopped in front of me. I was sure she had made a mistake. Or perhaps she was going to ask me about one of the other girls. I wouldn't tell her anything. Loyalty is one of my strong suits.

“You're wanted in the Reverend Dr. Flack's office, Miss Higgins.”

I still wasn't worried. The worst reprimand Dr. Flack had
ever given me was after a bunch of us had sneaked out to a dance. He'd said that I was a born leader and had to be careful where I led.

I took my coat and followed Miss Fletcher out into the frigid night, across the snowy campus, into the administration building, and down the hall to Dr. Flack's office.

Five words were all it took. He spoke them with appropriate solemnity.

“You are needed at home.”

NOTHING HAD CHANGED,
not the paint flaking off the front of the house, or the reek of yesterday's boiled cabbage, or the rancid smell of big ideas gone sour. Not the lean man with the shock of wavy red hair, the blue eyes that refused to see the world as it was, and the chiseled nose he might have sculpted for his own tombstone, though he was not the one who was dying. Not the emaciated woman, who looked twice his age, though she was two years younger, and had to stiffen her arm against the wall to keep from collapsing when she coughed.

“I'm sorry.” The sentence came from my mother's mouth as abjectly as the blood she coughed up.

I started to say it didn't matter, but the words stuck in my throat.

My father put his arm around my mother's shoulders and looked at her with eyes bleached as pale as his old work shirt. I wanted to gouge them. “She'll be back to her old self in no time.”

Her old self, I wanted to scream. What is that? A woman who doesn't have to prop herself against the wall when she coughs, but can bring up the blood she spits into her crimson-stained handkerchief without support? A wife who never had a chance
to recover from the last childbirth before taking to her bed for the next? A girl who sped from youth to old age with no stop between? But he didn't notice that. He loved her too much, if you could call that cavalier sex-fueled sentiment love.

“All she needs is a dose of good Irish whisky,” he insisted.

Good Irish whisky was his all-purpose cure. He wasn't entirely wrong about its powers. It cured all his ills.

I slipped into my mother's scuffed newspaper-lined shoes. They pinched and rubbed my skin raw, but there was no point in crying out at the pain. Mary lived at the top of the hill. Nan was in Buffalo. The older boys were away all day in the glass factory; the younger boys and Ethel were in school. My father heard nothing but the roar of grief in his ears and the soothing clink of bottle against glass.

The winter-shortened days passed in an endless round of man-centered chores. My mother asked for little. Later, I'd occasionally regret that I hadn't made peace with her during those last months. No,
peace
is the wrong word. My mother had no animus against me. Birthing and nursing and cooking and cleaning for a family of eleven children had left no time for complicated emotions, and if she finally had the leisure to ruminate, she didn't have the inclination. Poor Anne Higgins, as the neighborhood women called her, as if the adjectival pity were part of her name, loved all her children. That was what infuriated me. I wanted her to admit her regrets. I wanted her to say that if she'd had her choice, as the women on the hill did, if my father believed in French letters as fervently as he did in the single tax and socialism, she would not have spent her life populating the world and cleaning up after it. Like the priest who had taken to visiting when my father was not home, I wanted her to confess.

But if my mother feared for her sins, she recognized no mistakes. All she saw was the eleven children God had given her, because He could have taken them as easily as the two who died in infancy and the five who perished in her womb. She could resent her children no more than she could blame the husband she loved with a brimstone-courting carnal passion or begrudge the priest who cultivated her soul.

“Look what they've done to you,” I shouted one day, gesturing at the cramped room so furiously that my hand hit the wall.

She just smiled, a beatific worn-out Madonna who didn't mind being in a stable as long as she was off her feet for a while.

Do I sound harsh? Having your life wrenched away from you does that. But there was another side to those last months with my mother. Every now and then, I'd let the laundry go unironed or put off starting the supper and spend a quarter of an hour reading to her, or curling her hair after I shampooed it, or, best of all, talking to her, not about the marriage and motherhood I faulted her for, but about the youth she'd never had time to tell me about. I sat beside that drawn gray woman, saw a flaming-haired girl who defied her family for love, and felt a kinship I never had before. She'd once been a firebrand, not for a cause but for my father. She was still a romantic. And the more she reminisced about her youth, the more we reversed roles. She became the child, I the mother. I know now that's not unusual, but I was young at the time and found it strange, and not unfulfilling. In some inexplicable way, caring for my mother soothed the sting of her neglect.

She died on Good Friday. By then, the ground had begun to thaw enough for the men to shovel the dirt with easy practiced strokes. My father insisted she had waited intentionally, out of consideration for the gravediggers, out of complicity with her
God. He had even let the priest into the house to administer last rites. He would deny her nothing, now that it was too late.

Nan arrived from Buffalo for the funeral. Mary came down from the hill with a box of black gloves that Mrs. Abbott had donated to make our mourning more respectable. Beneath the pair that fit me, my hand was still bruised from the attempt to make my mother confess.

We stood at the grave, an even dozen of us. We stood like vultures around carrion. We had picked her clean. My father and brothers, down to the youngest, bowed their heads and held their hands clasped in front of them, like codpieces. My sisters and I did not bend our necks quite so low. Gradually my father began to sway, like a sapling in the wind, but the air was calm, and he was no sapling. He was tall and wiry tough, and drunk.

The priest went on for some time. He finally had the devil and the devil's children captive. And we endured, as we would have endured a dozen Hail Marys or pebbles in our shoes to remind us of Christ's sacrifice for our sins.

Mortal
bodies
, he intoned.
Resurrection
, he sang.

I
will
not
beat in my head. I
will
not
. I
will
not
.

A
ND I DID
not. Thanks to Mary and Nan, again, I made another escape. They scraped together the money for me to enroll in the nurses' training program at White Plains Hospital. I swore that this time nothing would stop me. And nothing did, until a lingering cold and fever sent me to one of the staff doctors.

Tuberculosis, he said, and the world went quiet around me. Pregnancy exacerbated the condition, he continued. I must never marry. I laughed at that, a dry rustling sound in my throat. I intended to emulate my older sisters, who swore they would never marry, not Ethel, my younger sister, who, desperate to get out from under my father or maybe only to claim something of her own in the chaotic world that was the Higgins household, had run off with the Byrne boy. She was already pregnant. Her recklessness strengthened my resolve. I had my mother's disease. I would not succumb to her fate. The hospital was my only hope. But now that was endangered too. How could I go on nursing if I was sick myself? I asked the doctor if I could continue my training.

He sat staring at me for what seemed like forever.

“I assume you've heard of Florence Nightingale,” he said finally.

I had to smile at that, though I had no idea where the comment was leading.

“Throughout her life, she has had to take to her bed with various symptoms of illness. But she's still alive and, as the saying goes, kicking. More to the point, she has saved millions of other lives. You're a good nurse, Miss Higgins. The world needs good nurses. Take the same care of yourself as you do of your patients and everything will be fine.”

Who was I to argue with a staff doctor and Florence Nightingale?

I doubled my determination.

The training program was grueling for girls in good health, murderous for a student who was not, and trying to hide it. For eighteen hours a day I sat in classes, ran up and down dark staircases—the dilapidated mansion-turned-hospital had neither electricity nor running water—emptied bedpans, made beds, and changed dressings. Not all the work was menial. I helped deliver babies, assisted at surgeries, attended deathbeds, and sat in on postmortems. But I was no Florence Nightingale. The smell of diseased flesh made me retch, and the sight of blood turned my knees to water. Nonetheless, I hid my weaknesses and whispered
I
will
not
under my breath. And again I did not, until the night of the spring dance at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Bill Sanger erupted into the ballroom full of cautious physicians in conventional suits and buttoned-up minds with a roll of architectural plans under his arm and a head full of subversive ideas beneath an artist's mane of curly black hair. He had dark brooding eyes, a hawk's nose, thin lips that sat in judgment of the world, and, God help me, a cleft in his chin. Still, I did not have to marry him.

He hadn't come to dance. He was delivering the architectural plans to one of the doctors. But the moment he spotted my flaming hair and my skin like marble waiting to be sculpted, or so he told me, he put down the plans, crossed the room, and cut through the circle of doctors to get to me.

What did we dance to that night? The Turkey Trot and Bunny Hug hadn't yet come along. Did we waltz? I can't recall. All I can remember is the sensation of man and woman. We might as well have been in a jungle clearing, pounding out a primitive mating ritual. Later I discovered that Bill had less sexual experience than I did, but experience was beside the point. As my brother who became a university football coach would have said, Bill was a natural, as unstoppable, fearless, and stupid as nature. And in the weeks after we met, I became his match and his mate. Sex beat in my head
I will, I will, I will
. Still, I did not have to marry him.

The sex was inexorable, but it was also a challenge. Bill lived with his parents. I roomed in the nurses' dormitory. In those days, only the rich had automobiles. But we were resourceful. In fields shrouded in darkness or carpeted with moonlight, he spread his coat and we undid buttons and hooks and ties until we struck the gold of bare flesh. When it rained, we stood under the shelter of a tree and fumbled through layers of clothing. Occasionally if a house was dark, we risked a barn or garage. The danger turned up the heat. Still, I did not have to marry him.

THE SKY WAS
leaden that afternoon, and the air ached with an impending thunderstorm. That was why I had put on
Nan's ugly blue hand-me-down dress. I didn't want to ruin anything nicer. As if the unflattering dress were not bad enough, my adrenal glands, the seat of my tuberculosis, were acting up, and I was running a low fever. I didn't have to pinch my cheeks for color, but I was hot-eyed and drawn. Funny that when I recall that day, I always remember how awful I looked.

We had planned to take a walk before I went on duty, but Bill arrived with a hired horse and buggy and announced he had a minister waiting.

“Waiting for what?” I asked, as he helped me up to the carriage. I wasn't being coquettish, at least not entirely. We'd talked about marriage. At least he had. But Bill's parents were observant Jews. I'd been raised in the Catholic Church, or just outside it. Why had he lined up a minister?

“To marry us, of course.”

I told him I couldn't possibly get married that afternoon. I went on duty in two hours. Note the coyness. I didn't say I wouldn't elope with him, only that I didn't have time to elope with him that afternoon.

“It's now or never, Peg. I'm not going to wait around to have my heart broken.”

The conversation was getting interesting.

“I don't believe in marriage,” I said.

His laugh was shrewd. The sound frightened me. Was it possible he knew something about me I didn't?

I tried a more practical tack. “They'll drum me out of the training program.”

“You don't need the training program. You won't have to work. I'm going to take care of you.”

“I don't want to be taken care of.”

He laughed again. Now I was getting angry.

“Of course you do. All women do.”

“I'm not like other women,” I said, though even as I spoke, I felt a pull as powerful as a rip tide. No more running up and down dark cold stairwells, no more retching at the sight of wounds and incisions and blood, no more exhaustion, no more struggle, no more fear, no more loneliness.
I will not,
I repeated in my head, but the voice was puny.

Did he sense my vacillation at that moment? He pressed his leg against mine. I felt the heat through his trousers and the ugly blue dress. It ratcheted up the temperature of the steamy afternoon.

“Please, Peg.” His breath caught in his throat, and I imagined I heard the death rattle of a man being strangled by love.

“Yes,” I answered, as my mother and my grandmother and even my little sister had before me.

FOR YEARS, PEOPLE
speculated about why I married Bill Sanger. I often wondered myself. Some said I was looking for a father. I could have told them that the one I had, overbearing, underprotective, huge of spirit, small of accomplishment, was more than enough, thank you. Others said I wanted security. Though Bill had the soul of an artist, he worked as a draftsman at McKim, Mead & White. But even then I must have sensed that he was not cut out for life in an office. Still others insisted I was thumbing my nose at the church. But though Bill had been raised as a Jew, he believed only in art, social justice, love, and sex. His sex upended the world. His love filled the hole my childhood had carved out of me. Maybe that was the reason I married him.

I TOLD NO
one except my family about the elopement. I was sure I could keep the nurses' training program from finding out. Perhaps that was another reason I married Bill, to break silly rules and defy foolish prejudices. My marital status would have no effect on my nursing ability.

He took a room in a boardinghouse on Christopher Street. I escaped there whenever I wasn't on duty. We no longer had to lie in fields, or huddle under trees, or risk being arrested for public indecency, though when the Sixth Avenue Elevated rumbled past our window, we sometimes scandalized the passengers.

The small room at the top of that down-at-its-heels house simmered with sex and love and one other joy. In the crowded, raucous house in Corning, sleeping, eating, and washing elbow to elbow with my ten siblings, I'd been chronically and deeply lonely. Now, suddenly, I was no longer alone. On the street, we walked arm in arm. At concerts and lectures, we leaned toward each other. At rallies, our voices rose in unison and our hands pumped the air in rhythm as we demanded justice. Then we'd stroll home and climb the steep steps that sagged to one side, breathless with the ascent and the anticipation of what we knew we'd find at the top, each other, ourselves. We roiled around the room, unbuttoning, unlacing, tugging at each other's clothes, shedding our own, until finally there was no boundary between us, and eyes wide because we wanted to see as well as touch and feel and smell and taste, we turned the world inside out. And sometimes, afterward, when we lay entangled and contented, I wondered why I'd fought marriage.

Then Bill began to talk about children. Night after night,
morning after morning, as the stench of summer steamed up from the street, as the first chill of autumn made me pull the covers around us, as the aroma of chestnuts roasting over trash cans made my mouth water, we went round and round. The discussion twisted and turned, but the line between us ran straight. Bill wanted them. I didn't.

He thought he understood my reluctance.

“I'm not talking about a brood of eleven or thirteen or even five,” he explained. “I mean a child, born of love, welcomed with love, raised with love. As every child should be.” He rolled over on his side and looked down at me. “As you never were, my poor darling.”

He leaned down to kiss me. I turned my face away.

“I've managed to keep our marriage a secret from the training program,” I reasoned, “but I'd never be able to hide a pregnancy.”

“You'll be graduated before you begin to show.”

He went on trying to persuade me. I continued to resist, though I never repeated the doctor's warning that pregnancy would exacerbate my tuberculosis. I refused to think of myself as a sick woman. I would not let others brand me as one.

“I just can't imagine your not having children,” he said one Sunday morning. Outside, rain pelted the window and the lights of the Sixth Avenue El cars shone a jaundiced yellow as they rattled by, but inside, our room was dry and warm. “Childless women are, I don't know, somehow unfinished. No, not unfinished, unrealized. Like a painting that's technically perfect on the surface but lacks depth and feeling.”

I thought of my sisters Mary and Nan. I didn't mean to, but I couldn't help myself.

“You're not like that, Peg. You're the most womanly woman I
know. You're the essence of womanhood. Not having children is a denial of that essence, as surely as not making love would be.”

He rolled over to me. I reached for the bedside drawer where we kept the French letters. He took my hand and put it on his erection. I let him.