SHE HAPPENED TO get the best bed in the room—the one next to the window. Visitors had room to stand at the side of this bed. Visitors to the other beds had to stand at the foot. Frankie took off from work and came over to see her as soon as they phoned him the news. Lines of grief took away the last vestige of boyishness left in his face. Embarrassed by the stares of the other five women, all newly made mothers who were pityingly curious as to how he’d take it, he bent down to speak into Margy’s ear. His back bumped the window ledge so he knelt down and rested his chin on the pillow.
“I’m sorry, Margy. Awfully sorry.”
“I know, Frankie. I know.”
“I can’t tell you how terrible I feel.”
“Poor Frankie!”
“Don’t hold things against me, Margy.”
“Why should I?”
“I acted like a heel saying I didn’t want the baby and all. But you know.”
“I know.”
“I sounded off a lot but it was just talk. I would have been crazy about her.”
“Would you, Frankie?”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I believe you.”
She knew he was sincere in what he was saying. He had been sincere, too, when he gave all his reasons why he didn’t want children. Well, he was right, she was right. Or maybe they were both wrong. She didn’t know. She didn’t feel like talking about it. She wanted to go to sleep and forget for a while.
“Talk to me, Margy.”
“About what?”
“Anything. Get it off your chest—the way you feel and all.”
“Why?”
“What? Oh, because you were always such a one to talk things out. You’d talk a streak about the way wax looked dripping off a lighted candle. And now you have nothing to say about this. It doesn’t seem natural.”
“But there’s nothing to say, Frankie. I was in labor for a day. You know about that. Then I heard the doctor say, ‘Breech presentation.’ Then the nurse said, ‘Which forceps?’ Then they gave me ether or something. When I woke up they told me the baby had been born dead. That’s all.”
“Didn’t you cry when they told you?”
“I don’t remember. I was too busy turning another corner at the time.”
“What? Where? What corner?” She turned her head away. “Margy?” he whispered. She closed her eyes. “Margy!” he called in a little panic. Her breath went in deep and she held it shudderingly.
He got to his feet, mechanically brushing off his knees, a habit that was automatic with much kneeling in confessional and pew and at the altar. On his way out of the hospital he spoke to the nurse.
“I wish you’d have the doctor take a look at my wife,” he said.
“What seems to be the trouble?” asked the nurse with bright routine interest.
“She talks a little like she was out of her mind—about turning around corners—things like that.”
“She’s still feeling the effects of the anesthetic, probably. But I’ll have Doctor take a look at her.”
“WHAT SEEMS TO be the trouble, Mrs. Malone?” asked Dr. Paolski.
“Nothing. Only where I carried the baby, it’s empty. But the emptiness hurts like it was a live thing. It seems to be eating me away inside.”
“Oh, you’re merely feeling afterbirth pains. They’ll pass after a while. In the meantime, I’ll have Nurse give you something.”
IT WAS A small funeral. No need for hearse, flowers or outside mourners. Frankie, his father and mother and Margy’s parents rode out to the cemetery in the undertaker’s limousine. Henny Shannon, holding the small white casket on his knees, sat next to the driver. Frankie, having had to take another day off from work, sat between his mother and mother-in-law. Malone sat on the drop seat facing them. The driver pointed out things of interest along the route. The passengers looked obediently and murmured conventional replies.
They should have felt tender and understanding, one toward the other, because they should have been drawn together in what people call the common bond of sorrow. But the bond between them was horror and hate and it pulled them away from each other. There was horror of being in that small closed space with something dead among them. Malone, for all his study of the dead, felt the same horror as the others. And there was hatred. Flo sat there hating the Malones. She’d always hated them anyhow—all except Frankie. And she only liked him because he was her son-in-law. Henny hated Frankie because through him grief had come to Margy. The Malones hated the Shannons because their daughter had brought this hardship on their only son.
Frankie was the only one not hating anybody. He was too busy worrying about his job and about money. He’d be docked two days’ pay this week and there hadn’t been enough money in the first place for the doctor and hospital. And now this! Forty dollars for the burial—very reasonable, the undertaker had assured him. Frankie knew it was reasonable but he worried all the same. He’d have to ask Margy could he pawn her wristwatch and her silver. Birth and death were two expensive items.
IT WAS MARGY’S first Sunday afternoon in the little hospital. The narrow room was crowded with visitors. Frankie, his parents and Margy’s parents stood in an ungraceful line on the window side of Margy’s bed. The stares from the five pairs of eyes beat down on her face like a hot noon sun.
Mrs. Malone wished she had been nicer to Margy. At the moment she thought of her more as a suffering woman than a girl thief who had stolen her son. She meant to be comforting and understanding.
“Well, Marge,” she said, “it’s God’s will.”
“Yes, Mrs. Malone,” said Margy obediently.
Mrs. Malone twisted her corseted hulk and looked behind her. “Lose something?” asked her husband.
“No, I’m trying to see where the stranger is,” she said.
“What stranger?”
“A stranger to Marge who goes by the name of Mrs. Malone.” Mr. Malone got the joke and guffawed. Everyone in the room stopped talking to stare at him, and Frankie was embarrassed.
“There’s no Mrs. Malone here as far as you’re concerned, Marge,” she said. “Call me Mother.”
“Yes, Mother.” But the word stuck in Margy’s throat and had to be washed down with another word. “Yes, Mother Malone.”
Mr. Malone, bright as a new nail, came in with, “Mother Macree. Shure I love the dear silver . . .”
“Shut up,” she said. He shut up. “Yes, you figure it all out,” she said to Margy, “and you’ll see it’s God’s will.”
Margy tried to figure it out. If there’s a God, she thought, and her fingers twitched with the instinct to make the sign of the cross to exorcise her blasphemous if, I can’t believe He’d give a woman this great longing to give birth only to take the baby back. No! God must have more to do with His eternal time than to punish birth-torn mothers that way. Something went wrong and no use putting it off on God.
“If you can only make yourself believe it’s all for the best,” continued Mrs. Malone.
How can it be for the best? thought Margy. What best? What is gained by the way you suffer if no living child comes as a reward? All you get out of it is knowing you can suffer an awful lot without dying. And of what use is information like that to a person like me?
Mrs. Malone wanted to give Margy some kind of a gratuity. “Maybe I didn’t always treat you right,” she began. (No. That was giving too much away.) She made a fresh start. “Maybe you think I didn’t treat you right. But it wasn’t because it was you. I would have acted the same about any girl Frankie married. Suppose your baby was a boy and lived and you brought him up and sacrificed for him and just when he got old enough to be a comfort to you, he meets a strange girl and marries her and . . .” Flo interrupted because she couldn’t keep still a moment longer.
“And how do you think I felt, Mrs. Malone, when a strange boy came along and took away the only child we had? But I try to be nice to Frankie just the same.”
“And why not?” bridled Mrs. Malone. “You got a good son-in-law, Mrs. Shannon, believe you me.”
“And if you ask me, you people got a damned fine daughter-in-law,” said Henny.
Margy tossed restlessly. Frankie worried. “You’re all bothering Margy,” he said.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, Frankie,” she said wearily. “I’m not listening anyhow.”
“I guess we wore out our welcome,” said Mrs. Malone.
Flo tried to fix things up. “If you didn’t mean nothing out of the way, Mrs. Malone, neither did I,” she said.
The apology was accepted. They dropped the argument and began to talk brightly of casual things. Flo saw a tear slide out from under Margy’s half-closed lids. She took a try at comforting her.
“No use feeling bad, Margy,” she said. “What’s done is done and crying won’t help. We must think of the living,” she concluded vaguely.
Margy sat up in bed. “You mean well, Mama. You all mean well. But nothing you say seems to mean anything to me.” She tried to explain.
“I don’t miss the baby. How could I miss something I’ve never seen? I miss waiting for it to come. I miss planning for it.” She started to talk fast and feverishly. She didn’t mean to say all she did but once started, much of the accumulated heart hurt of her short life tumbled out in fast-spoken phrases.
“You see, I wanted this baby so bad. I needed it to prove something; to prove that this could be a good world. I was going to get all the things I never had for this baby to prove that there are more than dreams in a person’s life. First, I was going to give it love.
“Ever since I was a child no one ever held me and said, ‘I love you, Margy.’ Oh, I know you loved me, Mama and Papa. You, too, Frankie—in your way. But no one of you would come right out and say it. I can excuse Mama and Papa—they never had the way. They had the way of the older generation. But you, Frankie . . .”
“Margy, Margy,” he said. She waited. Maybe he’d say it and maybe everything could be saved. He thought of saying he loved her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t alone with her and he could even less with his parents there.
Her father and mother said nothing. She hadn’t expected them to say anything.
She said, “I always wanted a doll—a sentimental thing to want, I guess. But I never had one. I almost believed that there were no dolls left in the stores. I would have gotten a doll for my baby. Yes, I would! Even if we had to eat bread and salt washed down with water for a month to pay for it. A child forgets a time of hunger but never forgets the aching want of other things.
“And if she ever got lost, I wouldn’t’ve hit her when I found her. I would’ve been so happy to get her back again. I’d . . .” She stopped talking. Her throat was tightening up and she didn’t want to cry in front of them.
Flo’s thoughts ran under her daughter’s words. She never understood me. She doesn’t remember how hard I tried. All she remembers is the quick slap; the times I didn’t get her a doll or a new winter coat. She couldn’t know that I loved her because I never could say it in so many words and I had no way of proving it. She never knew that the slap, the scolding was a way of taking it out on her because she made me feel bad because I couldn’t do for her all that should have been done. Oh, I wish her child had lived! She would have gone through what I went through, then. She would have learned then why I couldn’t do better. She would have come to understand that I was a good mother in my way.
Mr. Malone remembered the time Frankie had wanted a pair of skates and how he couldn’t afford to buy them for the child. The boy had bought one rusty skate from the junk dealer for a nickel. The memory came sharply into focus: the child hopping up and down on one foot propelling the skate which was on the other foot. It had bothered Malone. He had instructed the boy to alternate the one skate so he wouldn’t grow up lopsided.
Frankie was always a one, thought Mrs. Malone, to want to go to a boys’ camp in the summer. But there were the other children and not enough of money or anything else to go around. Maybe she should have tried harder to get the money to send him. But no, she decided, she had done the right thing. If she had indulged Frankie, the other children would have begged and teased for things. I couldn’t give to him and deprive the others. But if I had a chance to do it over again . . . she sighed.
Henny Shannon had his thoughts: A doll for a girl, tin soldiers for a boy. A girl practices being a mother, and a boy a general. They should have things like that—things all children want. If they don’t get nothing along that line they grow up figuring they’re not entitled to much. They grow up learning to be glad just to have a roof over their head and something to eat. They figure they get a break when they get a job—any old job just so it pays a few dollars. Because they didn’t have a doll or tin soldiers or skates when they were kids they grow up figuring they got no right to expect anything at all but the chance to work so that they might live and to live so that they might work. And people ought to be allowed to expect a little more out of life than that.
I told her I didn’t want children, thought Frankie. She’ll never forget that. But if this child had lived I would have tried to see to it that it got better breaks than we got. But what’s the use of telling her that now? No use telling anybody anything if you can’t prove it.
As if she could know all their thoughts and was now taking it upon herself to correlate them into a whole, Mrs. Malone spoke for the group.
“Marge,” she said, “there’s things you’ll never understand until you bring up a houseful of children. Parents don’t mean to deprive their children. But the way things is, they got to deprive them sometimes. A good child understands how that is. A bad child grows up brooding on it. Now I don’t blame you for feeling mean. You lost your baby. That’s a terrible thing. But you’ll get over it, believe it or not. We all feel bad. What happened to you happened to us in a kind of way. After all, it was my first grandchild. And that has a meaning to me. I get all choked up when I think of the other day when we rode out to the cemetery. A person wouldn’t be human if things like that didn’t make them feel just terrible. But like your mother said, it’s all over. Like she said, we got to think of the living. I guess you understand now, Marge.”
But Margy was tired of understanding; of trying to know how it was with others. She leaned forward on her elbow and looked straight into Mrs. Malone’s eyes. “Mother Malone,” she began.
In an instant, the way a dream covers years in a split second, Mrs. Malone had a vision as soon as Margy spoke her name. The vision was that Margy knew her, Mrs. Malone’s, worth at last. Margy would now be to her what her own daughters had never been—friend and confidante. From now on Margy would say to Frankie: “Go see your mother, Frankie. I’ll stay home.” “Frankie, your mother’s a wonderful woman. You owe everything in the world to her.” “Spend more time with her. Go see her every night. I’ll step aside because I know she has more right to you than I have.” “Don’t buy me any presents for my birthday or Christmas. Put the money toward a present for your mother.” “Ah, you can’t do enough for your mother, Frankie. She’s a wonderful woman.”
All this passed through Mrs. Malone’s mind before Margy repeated more insistently. “Mother Malone, I want to tell you something.”
“What, Marge?”
“Mother Malone,” said Margy, “I hate you!”
“What did you say?” croaked Mother Malone, her face flooding slowly with a turgid red color.
“I said . . .” Margy spoke quietly, not opening her teeth to let the words out. “I said, I hate you!”
The last thing Margy saw, before she turned away from them all and closed her eyes, was the red color receding from her mother-in-law’s face, leaving in its wake sloppy red splotches.
THEY SAY, THOUGHT Margy, that when a person suffers grief or pain, it makes them nobler in character. That’s not true. Not in my case, anyhow. When things were right with me it was easy to pretend people always meant well and easy to overlook mean things said and done. But after you go through something bad you realize that all the rosy ideas you had about things and people were childish make-believe. Or it could be that after suffering something you don’t have enough feeling left to pretend to yourself that it’s a right world. Or could it be that suffering wipes all foolishness out of you and brings you up to the truth and the truth is that a lot of people are small and cruel?
Take Frankie’s mother. Did the suffering of giving birth make a big person out of her? No! She went through what I went through but it didn’t make her ache for me when she knew what might be ahead of me. And take me: I went through once what she went through four times. But it doesn’t make me feel sorry for her in any way. It makes me hate her.
I don’t feel holy and broadminded just because I had pain and have grief. I feel cheated all the way along the line. I feel hate, too. I hate Frankie’s folks. I mustn’t hate Frankie because I’m married to him and I have to live with him. It wouldn’t be right to hate Mama and Papa, because my flesh and blood and bones come from them and it would be hating myself.
I hope I get over this feeling of hating everybody and thinking that nothing at all in the world is any good. I must get over it. Because how can I—how can anyone live in this world unless they have regard for other people and a lot of hope for a decent future?
If I ever got to really believing that things would never be any better than they are right now, I guess I’d just as soon lie down and die.