Next to Love (9 page)

On the fourth day, she goes back to the doctor’s office. The receptionist looks up from her desk. On her first visit, the woman could not have been more friendly. She asked where Babe was from, and where Claude was stationed, and whether she was going for a visit or to live there until he was assigned elsewhere. Now she hands Babe an envelope without a word.

“Doesn’t the doctor want to see me?”

“The results of your tests are in there.” She nods at the envelope without looking at Babe.

There is nothing Babe can do but take it. She starts to leave the office, then decides to open it there. She cannot risk misunderstanding the results.

She crosses the room to a chair in a corner, away from the two women who are waiting. As she slides her finger under the flap, she feels the paper slice her skin. A red spot spreads on the back of the envelope.

Holding the finger with the cut away from it, she draws out the sheet of paper and unfolds it. The words wriggle across the page. She cannot understand most of them. But one word, repeated twice, she does know.

NEGATIVE
.

NEGATIVE
.

She carries the paper back to the receptionist.

“This says negative.”

“Yes.” Her voice is curt.

“That means I don’t have … anything.”

“I don’t know about anything. It means you do not have syphilis and you do not have gonorrhea.”

She feels the other two women’s eyes snap up to stare at her. She does not care. She is saved. She goes to the Western Union office and wires Claude that she was delayed several times, but she will arrive tonight.

THE TRAIN IS PACKED AGAIN
, but she manages to find a seat next to a girl who is holding a baby on her lap and clearly pregnant with another. The girl is sitting on the aisle, and Babe has to climb over her to get to the empty seat. When she is settled, she turns to face the window, though there is little to see at this hour. Here and there, a light from a farmhouse burns a hole in the darkness. For a short stretch, the beams of twin lights keep company with the train. Then the window goes dark again, and her face stares back at her from the black glass.

The smudges under her eyes are gone. Beneath her freshly brushed hat, her hair hangs clean and carefully curled under. Her lipstick is impeccable. Her face gives away nothing. And neither will she. She will never tell anyone. If she tells no one, it never happened.

After a while, the lights in the window begin to crowd closer together, the beams of the cars grow more numerous, and she feels the train beginning to slow. People are standing, taking their luggage down from the overhead racks, and lining up in the aisle. The soldiers’ faces turn flat. Their eyes go out like snuffed flames. The smiles slip from their mouths. They are back. The wives take compacts from their handbags, smooth their hair, and reapply lipstick, though most of them have been powdering their noses and putting on lipstick for the past twenty minutes. Then they put their compacts away and, leaning on the backs of the seats, bend to look out the windows.

Babe snaps her own compact closed, puts it in her pocketbook, and bends. Through the window, she sees crowds of men in uniform, but no sign of Claude.

The train lurches to a stop. She hears the scraping sound of the metal doors being opened. The line begins to inch forward. When they reach the steps, she holds the pregnant girl’s baby, while a soldier helps the girl maneuver her suitcases down. The baby’s breath is warm and faintly sour against her neck. She hands the baby to his mother, picks up her suitcase, and goes down the steps.

The platform is mobbed but strangely hushed. The girls take a few steps away from the train, then stand on tiptoe, searching the crowd. Here and there, a soldier breaks away from the group of men waiting along the platform, and a name detonates in the night air. Then two bodies go crashing through the crowd like wild animals through underbrush, and the other soldiers and wives avert their eyes to give them privacy.

Babe’s name explodes in the darkness, and Claude is coming toward her, not the Claude she said goodbye to last New Year’s but Claude all the same. He is lean and taut as an iron rail, and even in the dim light of the station platform, his skin is burnished to a reddish brown. The angles of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath them lengthen his nose. His face is sharp as an ax. She drops her suitcase, and he grabs her, and all around them eyes turn away in decency.

He has managed to get a room. It’s only temporary, he warns her, as they make their way through the center of town. He is sure with a little footwork she can find something better.

The rooming house needs a coat of paint. The entire building seems to list to one side. As they climb to the third floor, the stairs protest under their feet. He opens the door and switches on a light. She blinks against the glare of the uncovered bulb hanging from a wire. One wall has a stain as big and brown as a gorilla. Three rusty hooks jut out from another wall. There is no dresser, closet, or mirror, but the two windows have shades, and there is a straight-backed chair and, in the middle of the room, a bed.

“I’ll start looking for another place tomorrow,” she says.

He grins. “I missed you like nobody’s business,” he tells her, then adds that he has only forty minutes before the last bus back to camp.

They get out of their clothes quickly and into the bed. The sheets are damp, and the mattress is lumpy, but they have never been in a bed before. An image of the stinking bathroom flashes in her mind like a cheap neon sign. She opens her eyes. He is watching her. She swims up into his gaze and molds herself against the length of him.

He lets out a sweet velvet moan.

The neon sign blinks once more, then goes out.

FOUR

JULY
1942

S
HE IS A FRAUD. SHE LIES IN THE HOSPITAL BED, WITH CLAUDE SITTING
beside her, holding her hand, and Millie tiptoeing in and out in her billowing maternity blouse, and pretends to feel what she does not feel, to feel the opposite of what she feels. Relief. Her relief is so huge it takes up half the hospital room. She is amazed no one else sees it.

The doctor with the hard pebble eyes was wrong. Or was he? She will never know. But the fear dogged her. It hovered over her like the Confederate flag the justice of the peace had hung in the study where he married Claude and her, took up residence in the creaky bed in the new room she found, and kept her awake at night and on edge during the day. As soon as the other doctor, the one here in Rockfish, told her the news, she knew she would never stop looking for markers. She would rejoice in crooked teeth that needed braces. She would monitor the marks on the wall measuring growth, praying the child would not tower over Claude. She would hope for a bookish bent and despair over a major-league arm, though both could come from her. That was the point. She would never know. It was her life sentence.

She and Millie went to the doctor in Rockfish together. After Babe left South Downs, Millie made up her mind to follow Pete to camp. Her trip was difficult too. She stepped off the train talking of long waits on sidings, and endless lines for the dining car, and no seats. “But everyone was so nice,” she told them. “The boys couldn’t have been sweeter.”

Pete reached an arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “How could they resist?”

“Don’t be silly. They knew I was married.” She held up her left hand and wiggled her ring finger.

Just as he knew I wasn’t, Babe thought, and felt a flash of anger at Millie, at all the good girls who played by the rules.

Three months later, she and Millie went to the doctor. Millie could not wait to find out. Babe had been putting it off. A few days later they got the news.

“Thank heavens,” Millie said. “It would have been awful if one of us was pregnant and the other wasn’t. I would have been so jealous.”

The real surprise was Claude. What about the children? he had demanded when they—no, not they,
he
—had argued the issue endlessly in Swallow’s Drugstore. There are bound to be children. But now he was all for children. A piece of himself for posterity. He never said that, but she knew.

He started making plans. Chances were he would not be here for the delivery, but she could go back to South Downs and stay with his parents. They wrote they would love to have her. Funny how imminent mortality and the birth of a baby obliterate the Sixth Street divide. Perhaps she should go north now. He would miss her, but a camp town is no place for an expectant mother. He ticked off the food shortages, the inadequate cooking arrangements, the walk up the steep hill to the club where the wives gathered each day.

The last gave her an idea. She began walking up the hill several times a day. Sometimes she ran. It did no good, nor did the scalding hot baths. She would not try anything more dire. The fathers’ and nuns’ hold on her was tenuous but not broken.

Millie bloomed. Her Dresden-doll prettiness grew more vivid, her blue eyes brighter, her cheeks more flushed. She started wearing loose smock blouses long before she needed them. Babe looked awful. That was what she told herself as she faced her image in the cracked mirror of the boardinghouse bathroom. She was into her fourth month and still throwing up. She knelt over the toilet bowl, spewing food, dry-heaving her rage at the man, at all men except Claude. He was one of them, but he wasn’t. Try to make sense of that.

Then all of a sudden it is over. In the middle of the night blood gushes. The pain makes her cry out. Millie, who has the room next to hers, comes running. Another wife clatters down the stairs to the telephone. The landlady stands in the doorway, arms folded across her withered chest, watching her sheets being ruined. To her credit, she waits until Babe comes home from the hospital to demand payment for them.

The doctor puts his black bag on the bed and leans over her. A striped pajama top shows beneath his suit coat. His breath is sour, but his hands are gentle. His voice is too.

These things happen, he says. Nobody’s fault. Nature’s way. You’ll have more babies down the road.

Nonetheless, he puts her in the hospital and keeps her there for a week. During the day, when the men are in camp, Millie sits in the single chair beside the bed, her hands crossed over her belly as if she is trying to hide her good fortune. Other wives come with bunches of wildflowers and plants from the nursery, a word no one will speak in front of Babe, and murmured condolences.

Babe lies on the white hospital sheets, listening to the cries up and down the hall. She is in the maternity ward. The baby from Brooklyn—the infants are identified by the places their mothers left to follow their fathers to camp—is colicky. The baby from Indiana suffers from jaundice. The baby from Louisiana will not nurse. Her own baby made no protest. He, she—Babe does not want to know—went silently.

You cannot kill a baby by will. If you could, her cousin Corinne would not have married at fifteen. But she will never get over the feeling that she has.

The doctor discharges her on a Sunday so Claude can take her back to the boardinghouse. The doctor comes in to sign the papers while Claude is packing her things and goes through the litany again.

These things happen. Nobody’s fault. Nature’s way.

Claude stops him. “Nature’s way. Are you saying there was something wrong with the baby?” He is not challenging the doctor. He is looking for a lifeline.

Sitting on the side of the high hospital bed, Babe reaches out and takes his hand.

“There’ll be other babies,” she says, picking up where the doctor has left off.

Claude turns to her. The miscarriage has knocked him back, like one of the obstacles on the training course. But she has come up swinging. He has never admired her so much.

THERE WILL BE OTHER BABIES
, they reassure each other. But not before he ships out. Her body needs a rest, the doctor says. They must be careful. And they are.

FIVE

NOVEMBER 16, 1942

Dearest Babe
,