The Midwife of Hope River (31 page)

38

High Tea

This afternoon when I went to the mailbox, I was surprised to find a plain square envelope addressed to Patience Murphy in tiny handwriting. We get so little mail, I tore it open right in the yard.

“Look at this.” I hold the pale pink note card, decorated with a border of roses, up to Bitsy, who sits at the table shelling the last of the dried beans. It's an invitation from our neighbor Mrs. Maddock. Kind of a surprise; she never seemed to like me until I had lunch with her and Mr. Maddock at the church. I put on a high-toned accent and read the note out loud: “Mrs. Sarah Rose Maddock requests the company of Patience and Bitsy for tea on September 29, 1930, at two
P.M.
”

“I can't go.” That's Bitsy.

“Why not? We can take a few hours off the farm.”

My friend looks down. “I have a quilting bee that day at the Hazel Patch Chapel.”

“Quilting bee! How come you didn't mention it? I like to quilt.”

“I stopped telling you about things at the church a long time ago because you never want to go. And anyway, afterwards I'm going to meet Byrd.” She says this with a shy smile.

Though I was younger than my friend when I first got pregnant, I've been concerned about Bitsy . . . I clear my throat. It's not like I'm Saint Patience, but this has to be said.

“Bitsy, is Byrd Bowlin courting you proper? I don't want you getting in trouble. Sometimes this happens when people are grieving. They feel alone and seek comfort. They can forget themselves.”

“Miss Patience, how can you say that?”

When she reverts to “Miss Patience,” I know she's mad.

“Byrd loves me and we've kissed, but it hasn't gone further. The Reverend Miller's wife gave me the same sort of talk . . . What kind of a person do you think I am? What kind of man would Bowlin be if he expected that?”

“Well, you know, all those young girls, like Twyla and Harriet and her sister Sojourner, aren't just tramps. Love has a way of undoing buttons. I just don't want you getting in trouble.” I think of my own thunderstorm night. After the loss of my first baby, I was never able to get pregnant again, but being sterile has an advantage. No worries about getting knocked up. Not that (with the exception of Hester) there's been any chance since Ruben died.

“I wish everyone would just leave me alone!” Bitsy jerks up to get another bucket of beans, then bangs down in her chair in a huff. “After the quilting bee we're going to his parents' for dinner, and then he'll bring me home in his father's truck.”

I'm tempted to say something like “Don't come in late,” but I let it go. I've said my piece. Instead, I croon with a grin,
“By the light of the silvery moon”
and throw Mrs. Maddock's invitation across the table at her.
By the light—of the silvery moon—to my honey I'll croon . . .

 

Tuesday morning we cut hay from the back pasture with the rusty scythe I found in the barn and sharpened with a file until the blade was razor thin. I swing the wooden-handled implement like a peasant woman in a painting, and Bitsy rakes the long sweet grass into piles and then drags it in an old blanket to a fenced-in area behind the barn. The stack is as high as our heads, but we'll need a lot more with a horse, cow, and calf to feed.

At noon we quit and, behind the springhouse, strip down to our waists and scream as we pour buckets of cold water over each other. Then Bitsy puts on her second-best dress and rides her bicycle to Hazel Patch, and I put on my second-best dress and wander down the dusty road to Sarah Maddock's for tea.

I knock on the three-paneled oak door with a leaded glass window. I hadn't noticed the ornate pattern before because the screen was across it, but the glass is edged with a delicate border of flowers and leaves. No one answers, so I knock again. There are lace curtains hanging, and I can't see inside. I hope Mrs. Maddock didn't forget about me.

 

“Hello!” I yell. “Anyone home?”

“Come in,” a woman answers from deep in the house.

I turn the knob.

“Patience?”

The call seems to come from way in the back, so I pass through the living room and enter the empty kitchen. On the way, I admire the cast-iron Phoenix woodstove with the ornate silver-plated top, the carved oak fold-down desk, and the floor lamp with the fringed blue silk shade, but there's no time to linger.

“Here.”

“Mrs. Maddock?”

“On the back porch.”

I'm expecting something like my own back porch, a small room where we keep buckets, our washtub, old rubber boots, winter coats, things that need fixing, and wet dogs, but I'm surprised to find a screened-in room that runs the length of the house with high-backed white wicker furniture and ferns in hanging baskets.

A round pedestal table is set with white cups and plates bordered with tiny pink flowers and cutlery that looks like real silver. There's also a silver tea set and a vase of deep purple asters. Mrs. Maddock rolls herself over in her wheelchair and takes my rough red hands in both of her thin, cool ivory ones.

“Call me Sarah Rose, honey. I'm so glad you came. Is Bitsy here too?” The table, I notice, is set for three.

“No, I'm sorry. I probably should have come down to tell you. She has a quilting bee at the church and then dinner with her beau. She's courting.” I say this with a smile and a slight shrug.

“Those were the days!” When Mrs. Maddock laughs, it's like silver bells tinkling. I sit down in the closest chair. I'm not used to the ritual of formal tea and am unsure what comes next. Is this high tea, like I've read about, the kind they have in England, almost a meal—or low tea? Looks like high tea to me, but what would I know? My women friends in Pittsburgh drank black coffee in mugs around a kitchen table where we talked world politics.

The wheelchair-bound woman pours me a cup and hands me a tiny embossed silver pitcher. “Cream?” Then she lifts a glass cover off a rose-glass plate and reveals white sugar cookies with white frosting. In another bowl are canned peaches.

“This is quite a spread. I'll be honest, I didn't know what to expect. I feel I should have worn white gloves and a bonnet.”

“I'll be honest too. I haven't had anyone to tea for fifteen years. Not since I got infantile paralysis. I was twenty-four.”

I glance at her legs and then at her face. If she was twenty-four fifteen years ago, she's close to my age now.

 

Sarah Rose

“Polio?”

“It was 1916, and I was pregnant and so happy and at first we didn't know what it was. I just had a fever, a bad headache, and stiffness of the back and neck. I thought I had some kind of flu, but I soon lost the strength in both legs and couldn't even get to the commode. That's when we called in the doctor and they took me to the hospital.”

“The polio epidemic was awful, wasn't it?” I respond, not knowing what else to say. “I heard seven thousand people died in 1916 in the U.S. alone. You were lucky you made it.”

“I guess.” She runs her hands down her withered thighs. “Four times that many people were left paralyzed. At the time, I
wanted
to die.”

“I've felt that way too.”

She looks at me with interest. “When was that? When you felt you wanted to die?” she asks gently.

That's why I don't socialize. There are so many things I don't want to divulge; it's like trying to dance with your legs tied together. Sarah Rose is still waiting. I'll tell just a little . . .

“I was pregnant and engaged to be married when I was sixteen and my fiancé, my lover, was killed in a train wreck. Seven days later I hemorrhaged and lost our baby. I almost died too. That's when . . .” I take a big breath. “. . . That's when I wished I would die.”

Mrs. Maddock reaches over the plate of cookies, now half gone, and rests her hand over mine. Her skin is so translucent you can see the blue veins.

I could tell her the other times I wanted to die. When my mama passed away . . . when I left Chicago on the run without a friend in the world . . . I could tell her about Blair Mountain, how I killed my best friend, my lover, my husband, but how could she understand, a sheltered person like Sarah Rose? The tears come then, just hanging there. I wipe my eyes and stand up to look out the screens toward the hills, but she scoots around the table in her wicker wheelchair and pulls me back.

“That's okay,” she whispers, thinking I'm weeping for my baby. “It's good to cry. I lost my little one too . . . when I had polio. The paralysis was moving up, and if it got to my chest I would stop breathing. The doctors thought there was no way I would make it. They talked Mr. Maddock into letting them do an emergency cesarean section, and he gave our little girl to my cousin who couldn't get pregnant. No one imagined I would recover, and then, when I did, I couldn't ask for the baby back.

“In a way, it doesn't matter. Both my cousin and little Sue Ann passed away a few years later, during the Spanish flu epidemic. I never even got to hold her. I have a picture, though, when she was two, a tiny blond girl. I'll show you sometime.” She holds out the plate of cookies again.

I shake my head no, but she insists, so I eat three. “Did you make these?”

She laughs. “Yes; just because my legs don't work doesn't mean my hands can't. Didn't you notice when you came through the kitchen that Mr. Maddock has made everything low so I can use my wheelchair? He made this screened room for me too, because I don't get out much.”

I take in the view, the mowed meadow down to a brook, a pen filled with white sheep, the Hope River in the distance.

“So what do you do out here?” I look around for an embroidery hoop or maybe some knitting, but on the shelves is only an assortment of books and papers. “You like to read?”

“I do,” she says. “I write too.”

That interests me. “You write? I started a diary. It seems so much has happened in my life . . . like I've lived three or four lives, really.”

Sarah puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. “Like what? Tell me one of your lives.” Her clear blue eyes wait, not leaving my face. “I like stories.”

 

Slow down, Patience, be careful. Some secrets you just need to keep to yourself.

Sarah waits while I stare at the ceiling. “Well . . . I grew up in a little town in Illinois,” I begin slowly. “My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a mate on a big freighter on Lake Michigan.”

I go on to describe my innocent childhood, as if it were a Louisa May Alcott story, to the point where my grandma dies of consumption, my father dies in a Lake Michigan shipwreck, and we find out he's gambled away all our money. I stop my tale where I run away from the orphanage and get a job at the Majestic. It makes a good yarn, if I say so myself. “That's lives one and two.”

Sarah hasn't said anything except “How sad” and “That must have been horrible!” until I get to the part where I become a chorus girl.

“Oh!” she shouts, clapping her hands like a five-year-old girl. “I was in the chorus line too! At a dance hall in Charleston.”
This
is a new image of Mrs. Maddock!

She laughs. “I was in my twenties. My sister, a waitress, got me the job. My mother didn't approve, of course, and neither did Mr. Maddock once we were engaged. That's where I met him. He could really cut a rug at the time.

“In those days we were encouraged to be friendly with the patrons after our show, get them to buy drinks, though the real money was in the gambling.” As she talks, Mrs. Maddock gets prettier and prettier in the golden slanting light. The low sun drops behind the mountains, and the scattered clouds turn first orange, then pink, and finally lavender.

“Milton and I were so in love. We married, and I got pregnant right away. He's never forgiven himself for giving away our child. But you see, he thought I would die from the polio. So many did. Widowed men didn't take care of children in those days.” I reach for her hand, cool and soft.

She looks around the beautiful porch room. “During the war, because he worked in the chemical plant in Charleston, he was given a deferment, and then when my grandmother died and we inherited this farm, we moved back here. That was ten years ago. I was born in this very house, you know . . . with Granny Potts.”

“I remember. You came up to the front of the church at her service, one of her angels.” I smile, but she doesn't smile back. She's on another thought.

“Sometimes I think he protects me too much, Mr. Maddock. His love is like a cocoon, but I don't argue. I have a good life.” We are still holding hands, and suddenly it's too much for me.

“You know, I had better get back. I need to milk. Thank you for asking me to tea. Is there anything you want me to get you before I leave? Can I clear the table and wash up?”

“You're as bad as he is! A fussy mother hen. I'm quite self-sufficient, so long as he brings the supplies.” She rolls herself into the kitchen, and I notice now that the doorways are a little wider than in my house and there's a long pantry on one side. I run my hand over the smooth low maple counters and the low sink.