Consumption. A disease snacking slowly on her insides. Each tiny bite causing her to cough. And cough. Unless she didn’t cough. And this was so much worse.
The doctor said rest cures consumption. But with nine children and a tenth still on the way, there was only rest if you were dead. And my mother was not dead, my father had seen to that. Though she might yet be dying.
My father sat by her side telling her jokes, reading her poetry, and sneaking sips of whiskey between her lips when she’d let him, his remedy for every ill. I pranced in with a pun now and then. If you’re going through hell, keep going. My mother always smiled weakly before whispering for me to return to my chores. Mary stayed behind from school to do the cooking and cleaning and washing, and of course to care for Clio and Henry.
Morning after morning we left for school carrying the worry of what might happen while we were gone. And each afternoon we returned to find her alive was like that wonderful feeling of pulling off your boots after a long walk. But the happy release didn’t last long because she was not getting better. She was not coughing.
Our house was suspended in a strange quiet, as quiet as a two-room cabin can be with eleven people shuffling about under its roof. Sometimes the babies cried, but Mary or Nan quickly shushed them. We were all busy listening for the sound of her returning health. Any one of us would have given a bucket of gold to hear her cough. Just one single dry, rasping cough. The winter turned colder, and the coal bin lighter.
“I’m worried about the baby,” Nan whispered across the pillow during an especially long night of silence.
“I couldn’t care less about that nasty little Higgins eating away at her in there,” I said.
Nan gasped. And Mary whispered my name in wonder from across the dark room. Ethel was sound asleep, as usual.
But I didn’t care. Even if these babies did turn into siblings I loved, first they took pieces of her, pieces we never got back. Even the ones that didn’t make it. Especially the ones that didn’t make it.
“Admit it,” I said, “babies are ugly, bleating little goats.”
Nan gasped again.
“Oh, stop gasping,” I snarled. “You’re always gasping.”
“Maggie!” Nan gasped. But then she clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m a gasper,” she solemnly acknowledged, and she laughed—a tinkling, high-pitched, happy giggle. And as if the joy of Nan’s laugh ringing out in the night cracked open the silence, my mother coughed.
Nan and I reached for each other over the top of Ethel, clasping hands.
“Did you hear it, Mary?” I asked.
Mary shushed me from her bed by the window. But she heard it. And now the three of us listened together.
She coughed again.
The opera in Paris couldn’t sound more beautiful than my mother’s cough.
* * *
The next morning after fetching two buckets of water to fill the dry sink for Mary, I hurried to my mother’s bedroom door to see how she was feeling. I found her sitting up in bed nursing Henry, Ethel curled up alongside her.
“Ethel,” I yelled, completely forgetting about my mother. “It was your turn to fill the sink.”
“Don’t be cross with her, Margaret Louise,” my mother whispered. “She’s just a baby.”
“Yes, Mother,” I said. But she wasn’t a baby. And the one person who should know this better than anyone was my mother.
Mary hustled into the room, a cup of steaming tea in one hand and Clio in the other. She stopped and dropped the baby into my arms. “He needs a fresh diaper.” And then she placed the tea down on my mother’s bedside table, whisking up the old cup from yesterday in the next motion. My mother’s eyes landed on my older sister, soft with approval. It was a look Mary was so used to receiving, she didn’t even notice it.
“Mother,” I said. “I hope you . . .”
Clio jammed his wet thumb up my nose. I yanked it out and was instantly overcome by a horrific whiff of his diaper. Holding him as far away as possible, I still couldn’t stop myself from gagging.
“Margaret Louise,” my mother sighed, and she turned her back to me as she moved Henry to her other breast. That was it. Just my name. But I understood her full meaning. It’s a dirty diaper. A simple task. What is wrong with you?
I watched Ethel wiggle in closer to her, and though I was only five feet away, I could hardly imagine crossing the distance to the bed.
Clio shrieked. I hitched him higher on my hip and trudged off to the wash bucket.
I have never understood why we called them dirty diapers. Dirt smelled rich and clean, like it had captured both the sun and the rain and shaken them up into the most beautiful potion out of which grew everything from sweet alyssum to yellow violets and painted trillium. All three of which I’d featured in my wildflower report. Clio’s diaper was not filled with dirt.
I breathed through my mouth as I wiped him clean with cold water from the bucket. He screamed and twisted away from me. Trying not to be cross with him, I begged him through clenched teeth to stay still. If only Mary had handed me Henry. Henry was so much more cooperative.
“Cold, cold, c-cold,” Clio stuttered.
Nan saved me, stepping in to finish the job, and I rushed over to the bucket next to the sink filled with breakfast dishes to wash my hands. The water there was also cold. Everything was cold. Everywhere was cold.
From the bedroom came the sound of coughing. And then more coughing. It was amazing how quickly her cough had fallen from the coveted melody it was last night to its usual rank of plain old sickness. As I scrubbed my hands, I made a silent vow to be the very first to her bedside after school . . . before Ethel could wiggle in her skinny little caboose.
Spotting me near the sink, Mary smiled. “Wonderful, Maggie,” she said. “Thank you. Once you’re finished with the dishes, you should hurry or you’ll be late to school.”
“But it’s not my turn . . . ,” I started to argue, but she was clearly gone, and so I began the darned dishes.
Thomas dropped his oatmeal bowl in the sink with a smirk.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
He popped me one on the top of my head.
I went after him, soapy hands and all, but my father came between us. “Enough playtime. There is work to be done,” he bellowed in his jolly way as he dropped his dirty bowl into what had sadly become my sink full of dirty dishes. “Now let me feel that head.” His big hands massaged where Thomas had bruised me through my thick auburn hair.
“This,” he said, “is the head of a fine surgeon.”
He always said this.
My father was a practiced phrenologist: someone who believed the shape and size of our skulls revealed our character, our skills, and our abilities. By trade, he was a sculptor, chipping away at blocks of marble until a beautiful angel emerged, destined to decorate the headstone of a rich Roman Catholic or Protestant of Corning. But to chisel each individual cherub’s likeness, he studied the skull, or phrenology.
Father believed the head was the sculptured expression of the soul. How wide-set the eyes, the shape of the ridge between them, a turned-up nose, how full or thin the lips, bulges in front of or behind the ears—all had meaning. A researcher had to be inquisitive, with curiosity bumps along the back of his cranium; a musician needed to have order and time over his eyebrows; and a brilliant doctor must possess the proper protuberances around the ears, which I had, as Father always said proudly. So, I would be a doctor. Because of my large protuberances. And the first thing I’d do was cure my mother.
* * *
Mary was right, I was late heading out for school. Not that Miss Hayes would mind. Girls were often late, and it seemed the older we got the later we became. Although this might make leaving school early to keep my vow a bit trickier this afternoon. I would have to catch up, and stay caught up, which I could surely do. I was good at school. I worked hard. Working hard at school was a requirement of a future doctor. Dr. McMichael had told me this much the day I splinted John McGill’s arm using the branch that cracked off the tree when he fell from it. When I’d asked about other requirements, the doctor had laughed and said I’d get over my desire to be a doctor by that time. Out of respect, I didn’t point out what a ratbag he was.
I hurried down the hill, not because I was late, but because, as usual, I was cold. The town of Corning hugged a steep hill rising up from the Chemung River. Along the river flats lived the factory workers who blew and cut the glass at Corning Glass Works. Their slouching houses were held together by laundry lines flapping with wash under which children scampered about like squirrels. The flats sat inside the black smoke belching from the furnace stacks of the factories. The hill sat above the smoke. On the hill lived the people who owned and managed the factory. Their giant houses loomed over two or three children so bundled against the cold they could barely waddle from their grand front entryways to their waiting carriage doors.
My family lived beyond the hill—in the woods alongside the Erie Railroad tracks. We weren’t a part of the flats. But we also weren’t a part of the hill. We were just ourselves, and a few scattered neighbors who called the woods their home.
I passed over West Fourth, my best friend Emma’s street. I’m sure she was already bent over her mathematics. Protestants were never late to school. And Emma was a Protestant, her father a manager of finance at the factory. Her house on the hill was a marvel of rooms, each larger even than our attic, with ceilings twice as high and store-bought furniture everywhere. So many chairs. There was only Emma and her older brother, James, and her mother and father. Four people and a glut of places to sit. In our house, my father had made every stick of furniture, and there were considerably fewer chairs than there were Higginses. To win one, a Higgins had to arrive early and be ready to defend it, as any Higgins with a heartier punch could swiftly remove you. Thomas always sat comfortably.
I slid into school and took my seat next to Nan. The coal stove was chugging, and I felt as though my frozen body was melting as Nan explained where we were in the mathematics lesson.
I finished my figures in a dreamy state, but still long before Nan finished hers. Nan was a writer, not a mathematician. She even won a prize for a story she wrote for a children’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion, this past Christmas. Mother kept a copy of it in the drawer with her Bible, a place where I had so wanted my wildflower report to find its way. There it would have nestled next to the single pressed chicory bloom she and I had collected on a long-ago sunny spring morning. I can’t remember why it had just been the two of us. I only remember that it had . . . along with the memory of the moment we came upon them. A field of bright blue, as if pieces of the sky had sprinkled down upon the greening earth. She turned to me with such joy that I instantly felt every last blossom had sprung straight from my heart.
“Let’s pick them all,” I’d suggested.
She had laughed, the sound of it swirling through the flowers. “No, Margaret Louise. You can’t pick chicory. It won’t keep. The blooms will fade to white by this afternoon,” she explained. “We need to enjoy them right now.”
She looked off over the field and breathed in deeply, and then she reached out and plucked a single stem. For me.
When we arrived home, she placed it gently between the pages of the Bible where it quickly turned white, just as she said it would. But I didn’t listen to her advice. The sun, the flowers, her smile—I’d enjoyed them every day since.
Glancing over at Nan’s work, I noticed she had passed by some of her problems. I leaned across the desk and began to help. Later, she’d do the same for my composition, correcting my grammar. Mary usually sat with us, but she didn’t need any help in her subjects. She was a master of them all. If my father ever played around with Mary’s head, he’d find plenty of meaningful bumps.
Over lunch I plotted my early exit from school, daydreaming about the warm position Ethel had occupied this morning. Emma was munching on hazelnuts and chatting about a new porcelain doll her mother had brought over for her from Germany. Thank goodness Nan was listening because I wasn’t. Emma never grew tired of those glass-eyed demons. I found them all a bit terrifying. I blinked at her as she expounded in detail on the doll’s corset, but my thoughts sailed off to my newly forming plan.
The class would end with a reading. We always did. It would be Milton’s Paradise Lost. It always was. I despised this poem. One woman destroys the world and sticks the rest of us with a lifetime of the bloody and painful birthing of babies? Really, that first man on Earth could have just not eaten the darned apple. However much I hated this poem, I planned to be the first volunteer to declaim it. And when Miss Hayes called up the next reader, I would return to my seat, swipe up my books, and act as though I was heading for the necessary. Miss Hayes wouldn’t stop the reading to ask questions, and I’d be out the door before Ethel could squeeze out her first whine. It was Friday. A long way from Monday and consequences. If Miss Hayes even remembered by then. My only regret was leaving the heat of the schoolhouse early because it was also a long way from Monday and a coal stove full of coal.
Every subject brought us closer to my plan. History came and went. French . . . le même. And just as I suspected, Milton was called forth from the shelf and I raised my hand high. Miss Hayes smiled at my enthusiasm, causing me a bit of momentary shame at my scheming. But it passed as soon as she called on me, and my plan was kicked into action.
I positioned my books, ignoring Nan’s questioning glance, and trotted to the front of the class. But then Miss Hayes placed Milton back on the shelf.
“I know how much you love plays, Margaret,” she said. “How about we begin The Lady of Lyons?”
I was thrilled to have Milton’s truly blank verse replaced with such a drama! I had to admit, I was quite the orator. Even Mary agreed. She said I was versatile. And Mary should know, she adored plays, and understood more about the theater than Mr. William Shakespeare. Which was by no means an exaggeration.
I threw myself into the reading.
“This is thy palace, where the perfumed light
steals through the mist of alabaster lamps,
and every air is heavy with the sighs
of orange groves, and music from sweet lutes
and murmurs of low fountains, that gush forth
I’ the midst of roses!”
When I took a breath, I heard a few snorts from the McGill brothers sitting closest to me. Thomas heard them too. My heart curled into a smile as I thought of how they would pay for those piggy noises. Thomas and I might be at each other’s throats every day of our lives, but my throat was a Higgins throat. And Thomas Higgins didn’t like pig noises.
I read on, lost in the love story of Princess Pauline and Claude Melnotte, the handsome son of the gardener, forgetting all about my plan until Miss Hayes stood and applauded. It was then that I realized I’d read straight through the entire first act and she was dismissing us.
First, I gave a quick bow—because it’s customary to do so when receiving such thunderous applause—then I tossed the play onto her desk and dove for my books.
Everyone was scrambling into the aisles between the desks, forcing me to elbow my way through to the door, with a special jab for the closest McGill. I was almost free when there in my path stood Ethel Higgins.
“Maggie,” she moaned. “Will you carry . . .”
I shoved past her, determined to let nothing get in the way of my plan. Grabbing my overcoat, I leaped down the steps, and . . . bumped right into Mary standing in Father’s old kip boots, and bundled against the cold by a large scarf made of thrown-off trousers. Mary wasn’t Ethel. She couldn’t be shoved past.