The Search for Joyful (37 page)

She looked at me pityingly. “A baby is not named. A baby grows into its name. And when he is ready, I will make a blue sky trip and bring him a name.”

“My baby's named already, even before she's born. Her name is Kathy.”

Elk Girl considered this and then nodded. “There is a holy bond,” she went on instructing me, “between named and namer.”

“I know,” I said. And it was true, I was beginning to know all manner of mysterious and unknowable things. Indian things such as Crazy Dancer dancing a path to the other world.

I went home with my head full of Elk Girl's remedies, chokecherry pemmican and camas roots dried in the sun then stewed. But the important ingredient she had given me was her friendship. That and pushing wide open the door to my Indian self.

The smell of him had come back to me . . . the first day I met him, grease and gun oil and sweat and outdoors. What if—? But it was not his baby I carried.

 
MAMA KATHY TOLD me it was an easy birth. Elk Girl, as good as her word, was there to assist, and I heard her and Mama Kathy in the kitchen, arguing about the
iskwao muskike.
I held on to Mama Kathy, to Elk Girl, to the sides of the bed as the rending and tearing passed the baby along the birth canal. I remembered a black-and-white illustration of the process in my student textbook, how logical the various stages, how mechanically correct. But when it happened in your body, too large a being squeezed along too small a passage raised the pain to an intolerable pitch.

It wasn't going to get born. I regretted my decision to have a home birth. I should have gone back to the city, had the baby at the Daughters of Charity hospital. They could have given me a spinal block. Why hadn't I done that?

It was too big, I was too small. Oh, God, I cried, picturing the wooden Christ on the cross above my bed in Montreal.

A final, impossible effort and it was over. Kathy was laid in my arms. I looked into my daughter's little wrinkled face. “Hello, Kathy. We're going to be great friends.”

“Newborns know things no one else does,” Elk Girl told me, and it made sense. They are so recently here, just moments before on the other side.

The baby was white.

Elk Girl was disgusted. “You wouldn't know this child was Métis.”

No, you wouldn't. She looked like Erich and like Elizabeth. Only her eyes indicated Indian blood, not brown but black. It was arresting in a fair face.

Mama Kathy was a typical grandmother. According to her the baby was beautiful and perfect besides, with a straight, strong back and well-shaped head—she could go on and on. When Kathy's black eyes met mine, I asked her, “Who are you, Kathy?”

Elk Girl also fell in love with the newest Kathy and forgave her for looking like Austrian royalty. She too fell under the baby's spell and oohed and aahed over her with Mama Kathy and me. Secretly she fed me roots of cranberry with an admixture of powdered bark so that my milk would be nourishing.

Of course I was modern and sophisticated and knew better, but I enjoyed playing Indian. For whatever reason, my milk was abundant and the baby throve. Elk Girl's little son was a toddler now, and, as spring grew warm, we sat outside on the porch, me with my baby in my arms, she with one eye on her little boy. The days were wrapped in a lazy, timeless glow. Then there came one, with Mama Kathy putting up jam in mason jars, and Elk Girl chewing tobacco beside me, a day in fact no different from the others, when a sudden energy took over. What was I doing drowsing away the afternoon? There was a whole world out there, and I wanted to give it to little Kathy with both hands. I wanted to take her to Belmont Park, show her the harbor, the ships and bridges, take her to visit evenings, when Sister Ursula played piano and the girls sang. I wanted her to see the lights of the city and the traffic flowing by, hear the caroling of Notre Dame's great bells.

I had come home to Mama Kathy. I had taken refuge in my old home. I had found my strength and composure. I had had my child. She was a whole and complete person. As she filled out and grew, she was becoming simply more herself. This Kathy was no ordinary little body. I looked into her face, and wide-spaced black eyes laughed back at me one moment, but how stormy they could become. How imperious, how demanding she could be if I was a second late offering her the breast. I was getting to know her. Happy and jolly yes, but definitely her own person and, I suspected, a complex one. How fulfilling to be her mother. She reminded me constantly that I was finally Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter.

“We'll be going back to Montreal.” The words blew about in the air like a dandelion gone to seed and fell into the mulch of the heavily pine-twigged earth.

“You're a fool,” Elk Girl said.

But I knew how to handle her by now. “Tell me something I don't know.”

Mama Kathy came and sat beside me on the step. “You're going back to nursing?”

I nodded.

“It's a wonderful profession, that and teaching—the helping professions. I've always admired them.”

I sat a while longer and Mama Kathy ventured, “If you need someone to look after the baby while you work—?”

I knew she was getting ready to brave sin city and nominate herself. But I couldn't let her do that, knowing how she felt. This was the home she'd shared with Mike.

“Don't worry, Mama, I have friends back there who will help out.”

I went in to start dinner and think about my decision. There were advantages to growing up in a small place like this, you knew everyone, and they knew you. Little Kathy would run freer here, but the mission school could not compare to a big-city school. I smiled down at my baby—I was getting a few years ahead of myself. But one had to think of those things. I saw little Kathy in a school uniform, her light brown hair neatly braided. Myself I did not see at all.

I considered briefly that I no longer had anyone to go back to. I was no longer part of Crazy Dancer's life, and I had sent Erich away. He might be part of my little girl's future, but he was no longer part of mine. Two men, I thought, whom I had loved. And who had loved me. But the war turned everything upside down.

I had a profession, one I was proud of and that I worked hard at. It tired me out often, but at the end of the day I felt good about myself. Besides, it was a means of making my way. I belonged to a new generation of women for whom that was possible.

There were fears, there were questions, and plenty of what-ifs—but I brushed them aside. I was ready for the fray. I could make it on my own.

 
THE LARGE GRAY slabs of rough stone that made up the facade of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul Hospital were familiar and welcoming. My heart beat fast as it had the first time I entered it. I carried four-month-old Kathy in a laundry basket; with it I marched into Egg's office.

She looked up. Her glasses slid along her nose to the turned-up end. “Kathy! And . . . ?!”

“Little Kathy,” I said promptly. “I want to come back, and I'm counting on you. I need to work,” I said, slipping into the chair opposite.

She didn't hear me. She reached for the baby. “Will you look at her. Will you just look at her!” Then, glancing at me and through me, “She's the image of her father.”

I heard the question. “Erich returned to Austria.”

“How could he leave this little beauty, this—” She stopped. She looked at me carefully. “He doesn't know?”

“No,” I said in a small voice, “he doesn't.”

Sister's lips came together in a straight line.

“There are reasons, Sister.”

“I'm sure there are.” But her mouth did not relax.

“He's needed at home. His mother came for him. His family . . .” My voice trailed off.

“A baby needs a father.”

“A baby needs a mother. And I can't live there, Egg. It's not my world, and I don't want it to be hers. It's old, and over here we're new and full of energy, and finding our own way. I can take care of her. I can. If I can bring her with me while she's nursing and leave her for a few hours with whoever is off duty, it will work out. She's a good baby. She hardly ever cries.”

“Absolutely not,” Egg said. “One of the girls indeed! She stays right here.”

I reached across the basket and threw my arms around my rotund friend.

I found a small apartment adjacent to the hospital. When I had told Mama Kathy I'd have help, I hadn't anticipated that from the first I would be inundated with offers. The girls vied with each other to baby-sit. Sister Egg wound up organizing the volunteers into shifts. Little Kathy was never without her devoted court. When I wrote to Mama Kathy that I was afraid she would be spoiled rotten, Mama wrote back, “Love never hurt anyone.”

The hours were long and grueling, but there was unexpected joy. Friends I didn't know I had rallied to support me. Emily was among them, an Emily no longer hesitant and unsure. She had never gotten over her habit of fixing and changing things. And in spite of it, or perhaps because of it, she had become Matron Norris's right hand.

Dr. Finch was an immediate ally. He said he didn't know how he had gotten along without me. “A surgical nurse is a rare and scarce item.” I was part of the operating room team almost exclusively now.

At the end of the month I discovered my base pay had been increased. I felt it was justified. I worked with a will, and I was joyful.

Kathy was seven months, crawling into everything, dancing in her canvas swing with elastic attachments that allowed her chubby legs to push off from the floor.

It was Sunday, and after services we'd spent the day in the park. Kathy was asleep in her buggy, and I was weighing whether I was less apt to wake her if I bumped the carriage up the stairs, or lifted her out of it and carried her up. Occupied with this question, I didn't see him.

He stepped out of the shadow in front of me.

It was Crazy Dancer.

He kissed me before he said a word. “I've been wanting to do that for a long time.”

There was a great rush of feeling in me that I didn't know how to give expression to. So I simply said, “Will you give me a hand with the buggy? I don't want to wake her.”

“I'll go backwards. You lift up your end.”

With two there was no problem, the baby slept on.

“I asked at the hospital. They told me you aren't married anymore.”

“It was annulled.”

“Kathy,” he said, “I feel like I'm in a minefield. I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing, make the wrong move.”

“Come in,” I said. “Sit down, and I'll fix tea. And jelly sandwiches,” I added, remembering.

“I didn't die,” he said, continuing the conversation we'd had more than a year ago, “because there was a sergeant waiting for me when I signed in. They put me on another ship. It turned out they wanted someone to look at these American torpedoes that had just been installed. They weren't firing accurately. For every hundred feet forward they fell about ten.”

“Did you figure out what was wrong?”

“Not at first. We tried aiming higher, but all that accomplished was for the shell to hit the surface of the water before sinking. Then I thought—if they turn up the drive-planes to shoot higher . . . This worked short-range, but long-range—Oh, what the hell am I talking short-range, long-range? I want us to be together, Kathy. That's a real cute kid you've got there. Anyway, we went down off the French coast, and the Resistance saved my hide. I wrote, but I guess it was too risky, and they didn't send the letters.”

“I understand,” I said. “And you have to understand too.”

“Right.”

“So.” I set the sandwich in front of him. “Were you able to diagnose the torpedoes?”

“Yeah. I found out from the gunner that to save money the Americans filled them with water for the test, instead of gun-powder.”

“Water? You've got to be kidding.”

“So what do you think?”

“About using water?”

“About us. You thought I was dead. Was the world supposed to stop on account of that?”

I sat on his lap and looked into eyes that mirrored mine. “Once you adjusted for the difference in weight, the torpedoes worked?”

It was a long warm kiss that turned time around.

“What did you say?”

About the Authors

BENEDICT and NANCY FREEDMAN live outside San Francisco, and are at work on more books that take the characters of
Mrs. Mike
into the present day.