Frances had not expected to spend the Fourth of July in her family’s own garden, disconsolate, watching over her little sister Ann while she dozed on a quilt spread on the soft grass. Nearby, Elizabeth and Mary played Graces, tossing a hoop back and forth from a stick held in one hand, their laughter and playful teasing sounding forced, even from Mary, who reveled in merriment and fun. Like their brother Levi, who had gone off somewhere on his own after their plans were canceled, the sisters had expected to spend the warm, sunny day at the glorious Independence Day celebration now well under way at Fowler’s Garden on the outskirts of Lexington. Nearly everyone planned to turn out for it, including all of Frances’s school friends, wearing their prettiest summer frocks and hats, with their hair neatly brushed and curled or braided and adorned with ribbons of red, white, and blue. Roast pig and great haunches of beef would be sizzling on spits over a fire, and there would be pies bursting with fruit, sweet lemonade for the children, and whiskey by the keg for the grown-ups. There would be speeches and music, games and gossip, flags and bunting and fireworks. Best of all, Frances would have been free to run off with her girlfriends for the entire day, putting as much distance between herself and her little sisters as possible without leaving the fairgrounds.
She felt a pang of guilt for the disloyal thought. Little Ann wasn’t so bad; it wasn’t her fault she was still toddling around in diapers, a responsibility rather than a playmate. Six-and-a-half-year-old Mary, on the other hand, was insufferable. Pretty and charming, with a dimpled smile, clear, wide-set blue eyes framed by dark lashes, an abundance of cleverness and funny jokes, and an easy grace and daintiness that eluded Frances, she won the admiration of nearly everyone, from Mama and Papa and Grandma Parker to their neighbors and teachers. Even Frances’s own best friends didn’t mind if Mary tagged along after them, though she was two years younger. Mary made them laugh and invented the most amusing games, entertaining her friends until Frances felt quite forgotten.
It was exactly the same at home. Mary enchanted everyone so completely that they seemed not to mind, or even to notice, her determination to have everything her own way exactly when she wanted it. If Mammy Sally was braiding Frances’s hair, Mary would dart over with her brush and wheedle and beg until Sally hastily finished with Frances so she could devote herself to Mary’s long, silky locks of rich chestnut brown with flecks of gold. If Mama was reading Frances a story, Mary would squeeze in between them on the sofa and ask her to start over from the beginning, and of course Mama would smile and comply. If Auntie Chaney asked the children if they would prefer cornbread or beaten biscuits for breakfast, Mary would quickly call out her own choice and plead for it so sweetly that the temperamental but exceptionally talented cook would nod and get to work as if no one else had spoken. If Frances was confiding quietly in Elizabeth, their much-admired eldest sister, Mary would dart over to shoehorn herself into the conversation, even if Frances was in the middle of sharing a very private secret, which Mary would soon blab all over the neighborhood. Later she would feign surprise when Frances, furious and embarrassed, reproached her. “She didn’t mean to hurt you,” Elizabeth would say, excusing her when Mary grew tearful and begged forgiveness, as if Frances were the one at fault.
Frances struggled to forgive Mary when her younger sister wronged her, to be as tolerant and patient as Mama and Elizabeth, but Mammy Sally wasn’t fooled. “You best snuff out that jealousy before it make you sour and mean,” she warned Frances once, an amused glint in her eye. “You was the center of attention when you was the baby sister. Now it’s Miss Mary’s turn.”
All Frances could do was nod and promise to try, but honestly, how was that admonition supposed to make her feel any better? What good did it do her now to know that she had once been the center of attention if she didn’t remember how lovely it had been?
Anyway, Mary wasn’t the baby sister anymore; Ann was, and newborn brother George Rogers Clark Todd was younger still. Sometimes Frances guiltily hoped that Mary too would soon find herself overlooked and forgotten as attention shifted to her younger siblings. Recently, as if sensing that possibility, Mary had taken to pretending that Ann did not exist—except when the younger girl wailed, impossible to ignore. Then Mary would grimace and stuff her fingers in her ears.
Frances smiled smugly to herself whenever she observed signs that Mary was becoming anxious about her place in the family, but almost immediately she would feel ashamed of herself. Mary was oblivious to her ugly thoughts, but even so, Frances would try to make up for them by inviting her to play dolls together or offering to read her a favorite story. Mary was unimpressed by Frances’s generosity. “You hate dolls,” she would reply, or, “I can read it myself.” The rebuffs were insulting, but they made Frances feel vindicated for her unsisterly thoughts, so it wasn’t all bad.
Still, no matter how much Mary provoked her, Frances knew it was a sin to take pleasure in a sibling’s unhappiness. Brothers and sisters were precious. Accidents or illnesses could snatch away any of them at any moment, just as a fever had taken baby brother Robert three years before. Mama had been terribly sad for a very long time, until Frances had almost forgotten the sound of her merry laugh, once as clear and light as a silver bell. Blessedly, Ann had come along about two years later, and their cheerful, smiling Mama had returned to them from wherever she had gone, no longer lost to them. Surely, Frances and Elizabeth privately agreed, the new baby’s arrival would drive any lingering sadness from the household.
So it had seemed, until that deceptively lovely July Fourth day as Frances sat on the quilt beside slumbering Ann, her gaze fixed on the house, on the window of the bedchamber where her mother burned with fever.
Just two days before, the reassuringly calm midwife—Mrs. Leuba, the watchmaker’s wife from down the street—had arrived with her bag of instruments and poultices. She had smiled at the children and climbed the stairs to Mama’s room, alone. Behind the closed door, Elizabeth whispered to Frances, their mother lay in bed with the windows shut and the curtains drawn, the air still and stifling. The precautions kept out harmful drafts but did little to muffle their mother’s moans, which sent a shiver down the back of Frances’s neck and made her faintly ill from worry.
She did not overhear her mother’s ordeal for long, for soon after the midwife’s arrival Papa told Mammy Sally to take the children up the hill to Grandmother Parker’s house, where they were to remain until Mama had been safely delivered of her child. There Elizabeth dutifully helped their grandmother look after Mary and Ann, and Levi helped the servants with the outside chores, but Frances spent the hours pacing on the front porch and gazing intently down at her own home, built on the lower half of Grandmother Parker’s lot. She tried in vain to glimpse signs of movement through the drawn curtains of her house, cringing whenever the wind carried a particularly sharp cry of pain to her ears. Grandmother Parker eventually called her inside for supper, but Frances returned to her post as soon as the table was cleared.
At dusk, she begged, “May I please run down to the house and find out what’s taking so long?”
“Sometimes a woman’s travail can last a day or more,” Grandmother Parker replied, but she agreed to send her maid to inquire, since Papa had expressly asked her to keep the children away. The maid returned with the welcome news that everything was going as expected. Papa sent his love and told them not to worry, but how could Frances not?
The next morning she picked at her breakfast and halfheartedly agreed to mind Ann so her grandmother could finish sewing some garments for the baby’s layette. It seemed ages until Papa finally strode up the hill—light brown hair tousled, cheeks ruddy, blue eyes shining with pride, tall and strong and handsome—to announce that the children had a new baby brother.
Levi, who had fervently prayed for another boy, cheered and punched his fist in the air, while Elizabeth, Frances, and Mary laughed with delight and hugged one another. Ann looked on, confused, thumb in her mouth, until Papa laughed and swept her up in his arms. “If you promise to be quiet and not tire your mother,” he said, looking around at the older children, eyebrows raised for emphasis, “you may come see her now and meet your new brother.”
They promised to be good, so Papa led them home and upstairs to Mama’s bedchamber. They found her sitting up in bed supported by thick down pillows, her face pale but eyes shining, a tiny swaddled bundle in her arms. One by one she called the children forward and introduced them to little George, wrinkled and red-faced, his eyes squeezed shut. When it was Frances’s turn to meet him, he gave a start and a tiny fist burst free from the swaddling blanket. “He’s waving hello to you,” Mama said, soft laughter in her voice.
Frances smiled, thrilled. Little George had not shown such favor to anyone else.
After Frances ceded her place beside Mama to Elizabeth, she watched Papa quietly confer with Mrs. Leuba as she packed her black bag. They smiled and nodded as they spoke, so although Frances couldn’t make out their words, she knew all was well. Mrs. Leuba left soon thereafter, promising to return in the morning to check on mother and baby.
Eventually Mammy Sally shooed the children out of the room while Grandmother Parker settled down in the chair at Mama’s bedside. Papa, who had stayed up all night, dragged himself off to Levi’s bedroom, flung himself down on the bed, and quickly sank into a deep sleep. Frances and her sisters tiptoed off to the parlor, but although they thought they were playing quietly, Mammy Sally soon ordered them outside. Joyful and relieved, they ran and played on the shady hill between their house and their grandmother’s, Ann alternately balanced on Elizabeth’s hip or Frances’s. Whenever they asked Mary to take a turn carrying her, she would recoil, shaking her head and protesting that Ann was too heavy for her.
“Just hold her by the hand then,” said Frances irritably. “You should take a turn minding her.”
“I minded you when I was your age,” Elizabeth said, offering Mary an encouraging smile, as if it was worry rather than disinterest that kept Mary from eagerly volunteering. “You and Levi both.”
Mary sighed and grudgingly let Ann cling to her hand as she unsteadily followed Elizabeth and Frances around the yard. Mary hated to be restrained from skipping along the stone paths or dancing over the lawn, free and unencumbered, and as soon as she could persuade Elizabeth to take over for her, she pried her fingers free of Ann’s grasp and darted away.
Mama was too weary to join them for supper, but she was feeling so well that, as Papa assured the children, he could keep his promise to take them to the Independence Day celebration the next day. Mama would stay home and rest, with Grandmother Parker, Auntie Chaney, and Mammy Sally there to tend to her and the baby.
But the next morning, Frances discovered, Mama had come down with a fever in the night. Responding swiftly to Papa’s summons, Mrs. Leuba had administered draughts and applied poultices, but when she left shortly after dawn, lips pressed together and strain evident in the lines around her eyes, Mama was no better.
The children were still at breakfast, pretending to be cheerful for little Ann’s sake and murmuring worriedly among themselves, when Papa returned from fetching his friend Dr. Warfield, a professor at Lexington’s Transylvania Medical School. “Papa?” Mary called, bolting from her chair, but the two men hurried past the kitchen and up the stairs without a word. Elizabeth lay a hand on Mary’s shoulder, gently pushed her back into her seat, and encouraged her siblings to finish eating, but none of them were hungry anymore.
A faint tremor in her voice, Auntie Chaney scolded them for not cleaning their plates and sent them out to play. Neither she nor Mammy Sally nor Papa had mentioned the Independence Day celebration. Indeed, their agitated father had scarcely spoken a word to any of them as he raced in and out of the house on errands, and as they left through the back door, the silent looks they exchanged conveyed that they all knew their mother was very ill—much too ill for Papa to leave the house except to fetch another doctor.
As the day passed that was exactly what he did. After Dr. Warfield left, Papa summoned Dr. Dudley, a professor of anatomy and surgery at the university who was well liked by all and known for his cheerful manner. But he wasn’t smiling when Frances glimpsed him approaching their front door with his black leather bag, then scarcely pausing to remove his hat as Papa grasped his arm and led him upstairs to Mama.
Auntie Chaney remembered to feed them lunch, but she made them eat outside on the veranda. They preferred eating on the veranda in the summer, but that day it seemed like a punishment, a means to keep them away from Mama. They picked at their food, but only Ann, unaware of the tension that gripped the rest of them, ate more than a mouthful.
“Do you think—” Frances hesitated, then rephrased the question she was afraid to ask. “Do you think Mama will get better?”
She had directed her question to Elizabeth, but Mary blurted, “Of course she’s going to get better! What a stupid thing to say. She’s just tired from having a baby.”
Stung, Frances was about to retort when Levi said somberly, “Mama isn’t just tired. Papa wouldn’t call Mrs. Leuba and two doctors if she was only tired. He would just let her sleep.”
“She has a fever,” said Frances, knotting her fingers together in her lap. “I heard Mrs. Leuba tell Mammy Sally. A fever took baby Robert—”
“That’s different,” said Mary. “That was a baby sickness. Mothers don’t get baby sicknesses.”
“Sometimes they do,” countered Frances. “Anyway, I’m not saying Mama has what took Robert, just that a high fever is very bad—”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Elizabeth interrupted, giving Frances a pointed look and tilting her head toward Ann, and then ever so slightly toward Mary, who had risen from her chair, face flushed, chin trembling, glaring at Frances as if daring her to speak another horrid word.
Resigned, Frances said nothing more about the terrible, cold, sinking fear in her stomach that seemed to spread throughout her chest and into her limbs as the day passed. By midafternoon, as she sat on the blanket minding Ann while Elizabeth distracted Mary with games and Levi wandered off to find some mischief, a third doctor had replaced the second—Dr. Richardson, a standoffish fellow less popular in Lexington than Dr. Warfield and Dr. Dudley, but a specialist in midwifery and women’s ailments.
At least that was what Grandmother Parker told them when she arrived to look after them while their mother was subjected to complicated medical treatments they were too young to know about. But Frances knew something of this forbidden knowledge, for she had surreptitiously read a book Mrs. Leuba had left for Mama when she entered her confinement. She wondered if they had given Mama calomel for purging, or laudanum to reduce cramping, or if they would perhaps try bloodletting. The descriptions hadn’t bothered Frances when she had read the words on the page, but when she imagined the treatments being inflicted upon her mother, she felt sick and wanted to sob. She couldn’t seek comfort from anyone, however, because she wasn’t supposed to have read that book and it was her own fault for doing it on the sly.
Grandmother Parker sent them to bed early, even Elizabeth, who crept from her own bed into Mary’s when the younger girl began weeping into her pillow. Eventually Elizabeth was able to calm her, and to the sound of her younger sister’s sniffling, Frances drifted off to sleep.
In the morning she woke to an unsettling silence. As she sat up in bed, Elizabeth stirred, one arm still around Mary’s shoulders as she slept. Their eyes met, and they both knew that something was terribly wrong.
Slowly they washed and dressed, delaying the blow to come, then crept quietly from their room rather than wake their sisters. The door to their parents’ bedchamber was closed, and from behind it came the sound of low, muffled weeping. Papa? Frances had heard him weep only once before, when baby Robert—
A chill swept over her, so cold she could scarcely breathe. She felt Elizabeth take her hand. “We must be brave for the little ones,” her elder sister choked out in a whisper.
Frances’s first contrary instinct was to think that maybe they wouldn’t have to, maybe it wasn’t what they feared. Her next thought was, Who will be brave for me?
They descended to the kitchen, where they found Auntie Chaney fighting back tears as she sliced and buttered bread for their breakfast as if it were an ordinary day and not the worst of all their lives. She and Mammy Sally abruptly broke off their hushed conversation when the children entered. “Poor little lambs,” Mammy Sally said and held out her arms. They ran to her embrace, but Frances couldn’t hear her words of comfort over the roaring in her ears. She didn’t want to hear them. Until she did, she could cling to the hope that everyone was sad only because Mama was very ill, nothing worse than that, and in time she would get better and no one would need to be sad anymore.
But Grandmother Parker entered then, ashen-faced and trembling, George in his swaddling blanket in the crook of one arm. She grasped the back of a chair for support, inhaled deeply, and told them that their mother had passed away in the night.
Frances stumbled through the hours that followed in a daze, numbly looking on as Levi and then Mary joined them in the kitchen and absorbed the terrible news. Before long Ann’s plaintive cry drifted downstairs to them, and since Elizabeth was holding Mary, tears streaming down her own face as she tried to soothe her younger sister, Frances was sent upstairs to get Ann. “Mama is gone,” Frances told her as she changed her diaper and washed her face and hands, but Ann only blinked at her, uncomprehending. Lucky Ann, Frances thought, but immediately realized how wrong she was. Ann would have no memories of their beloved mother in the years to come. Even sad memories were better than none.
Frances carried Ann downstairs and fed her some bread and butter. Soon thereafter Papa appeared, eyes bloodshot, face pale and haggard, and told them in a husky, unfamiliar voice that they must all come upstairs and say good-bye to their mother. For a moment Frances felt a rush of hope: they could not say good-bye if Mama had already left them. But when her father and grandmother took them upstairs and arranged them around the bed and she saw her mother lying in repose on the pillows, her laughing eyes closed forever, her graceful hands folded upon her chest, Frances understood, and she felt a terrible surge of rage toward her father for unwittingly deceiving her.
The children said their hesitant good-byes, all save Ann, who frowned and repeated, “Mama? Mama?” as she looked from the still, silent figure on the bed to the faces of her father and siblings, uncomprehending. She dutifully kissed their mother’s cheek when Frances held her near, but then her brow furrowed and she began to cry because everyone else was crying.
Papa’s voice broke as he handed baby George to Mammy Sally and told her to take the children away. As soon as she led them from the room, Levi bolted down the stairs and out the back door, while the sisters went to the parlor, waiting for whatever would happen next, dreading it.
Sick at heart, Frances longed to rest her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder and find comfort in her soothing words and gentle embrace, but Mary had gotten there first, scrambling onto Elizabeth’s lap the moment she sat down, wailing and shrieking with grief so that Frances could barely hear herself think. There was nothing for Frances to do but find herself a place on the sofa opposite and cuddle Ann on her lap, since she absolutely refused to be put down. Frances glowered at Mary as she waited for her sister to calm herself and take a breath so that she could have her turn in Elizabeth’s arms, but Mary would not be consoled. That was the moment when Frances knew that Mary would always—always—need Elizabeth more than she did, and that Elizabeth would always be there for her, trusting that Frances would be fine on her own.
She would have to be, Frances realized, hugging Ann a little tighter as she burned with grief and resentment. Mary would always come first.