Trieste
JULY 1907
I LEFT THE SHUTTERS OPEN LAST NIGHT, HOPING FOR A BREEZE to come down from the Carso to stir the close air in our room. A fat cut of sunlight falls across the bed and I admire the lemony shine of it across the shadowed sheet. My mind idles and I find myself wondering why we’re made at all, us people. Why did God put us on this earth, no better than beetles, when it comes to it, to run around and eat and drink and sleep? To push ourselves from here to there; to move, daily, our small piles of possessions from one spot to another.
I get up and let my thoughts wander on a while, as they do when this kind of melancholy descends, and for the thousandth morning in a row it feels, I do the same things: pee in the pot, wipe myself, dash water onto my face, dry it off, make coffee, sit at the table, slather jam onto bread, eat it. The only difference this last while is that Jim is away in the hospital, so I’ve no one to complain to about my endless nighttime fumbles for the pot, or the ache in my spine, the vast heaviness of my breasts, or the rude thrust of my belly. I talk to Stannie some mornings, of course, and Georgie, but not of such intimate things, and I miss Jim like the maimed soldier misses his absent limb.
Georgie sleeps on this morning and I let him; my thoughts are company enough. The baby inside me wriggles, woken, I like to think, by the jolt of sweetness from my apricot jam. Jim says he’ll have to take on a private student so we can buy bigger and bigger pots of my favorite jam. Kind Jim. Darling Jim. Noble Jim. My greatest love, stricken by rheumatic fever. What if he’s mortally ill and God takes him? I cross myself and pray to the Blessed Virgin, and her son, to spare Jim. I’d go into the grave after him if he died; I’d have no taste for this life without Jim. Tears plop onto the table and sobs racket through me. Now Georgie is out of the bed and over to me; standing in his nightshirt, he dabs at my face with his sleeve.
“Mamma, per favore non piangere. Please don’t cry.” And his wee faceen is so crumpled with worry that I shake the maudlin off myself and force a grin.
“It’s all right, Georgie,” I say, pulling him onto my lap. “Mamma’s all right.”
He wraps his little body around the egg of my belly and whispers, “Bambino.”
“Sì, Georgie, è un bambino,” I say, amazed at his knowing this for we haven’t told him that there’s a little one on the way. “But you’re still my only one, my baby darling.”
We sit and I rock my son, and along with him the tiny one within, and my worries shiver away into the morning.
I GO TO THE JACOB’S BISCUIT TIN WHERE WE KEEP OUR MONEY and it’s empty save for a few sad coins. With Jim not working, there’s nothing to put in it. What if he dies on me altogether? What on God’s earth would I do then? I shake my head to remove the thought.
“I’ll take in laundry again,” I tell Stannie.
“No,” he says, “you most certainly will not, Nora. I’m able to look after you and Giorgio until Jim is out of the hospital.”
“Doctor Sinigaglia says Jim could be another month in there. It seems terrible to sit so squarely on you when you earn so little. What are we to do, Stannie?” He grimaces. I know Pappie and his sisters continue to beg him for money. It’s not fair and I feel it keenly. “Let me take in a small bit of washing; it would please me to earn a few lire. It sits on my conscience terrible that we’re a burden to you. I’ll only take in ladies’ things, undergarments and such.”
“I’d rather you didn’t, Nora. In fact, I forbid it and Jim would too. Your time is near and you should be at rest as much as possible, not bent over a tub of filthy garments.”
“But I—”
Stannie holds up his hand. “No, I mean to be firm now. I’m covering Jim’s teaching hours at the Berlitz, after all. We’ll be grand.”
But I know Stannie will borrow from the school to get us by and we’ll all be up to our oxters in debt by the time Jim is well. I sit on the side of the bed and Stannie sits at the table, turning his cup but not drinking the coffee.
“You’re a good man, Stanislaus Joyce.”
He nods in that embarrassed, dismissive way of his. I throw my feet onto the bed and lean back.
“I’ll leave you in peace, Nora.”
“Stay awhile, Stannie, won’t you?”
“I can’t. I have to talk to Artifoni about Jim.”
I nod, drowsy now. Stannie comes over and carefully arranges my shawl over me. He puts his hand to my shoulder and I pat it. “Thank you,” I say and smile up at him. His eyes on me are tender and he looks like he wants to say something, but he pulls his hand away quickly and is gone. I wonder, sometimes, if I should be a bit more distant with Stannie, less softhearted. I love him and he loves me, but it’s not the same as what I share with Jim. It’s not that sort of love. But Stannie might mistake me, if we go on as we are. But I also know I couldn’t spurn him, be cold toward him and pretend I don’t care for him—he’s lonely enough without that.
I lie on and doze while Georgie plays with his toy animals and chatters to himself. I have fleeting dreams; one where we’re in a broiling, lion-filled South Africa—a place Jim recently thought he’d like to live—and then we’re in Dublin, flying above the river Liffey on this very bed. I dream I’m being licked down below and it stirs me nicely; I prop on my elbows to watch, but it’s Stannie’s face that comes up from between my legs, wet from my juices and with a determined look to his face that I’ve never seen before. The surprise of it pulls me out of sleep and, when I’m properly awake, I have a feeling like a belt being tightened around my middle and I realize that it has started: the baby means to come today. I groan. With Stannie gone, I’ll have to get to the hospital on my own.
I HAUL MYSELF TO SIGNORA CANARUTTO’S AND SHE TAKES GIORGIO; the signora thinks I’m only going to visit Jim, and I don’t want to alarm her. Neither do I want her to offer to pay for a cab for me, I’d be too embarrassed to accept. But halfway to the Ospedale Civico I regret my pride. The heat is vicious, it seethes around my face, and I’m finding it awkward to walk and breathe, and to carry my basket of things I’ve readied for the baby on top of dealing with the pains that threaten to floor me at every hand’s turn. I keep having to stop, set down the basket, and push my palms into a wall to steady me. I try not to gasp aloud with the agony of the searing in my lower body; I don’t want half of Trieste crowded around me to gape and comment. The baby is bearing down fast and I feel as if I’m going to give birth on the street. I push forward, my gait a labored waddle, and at last I see the long stretch of the hospital building. I force myself on, each step a torture, for it’s now as if the baby’s head is squashed down between my legs. I gain the foyer at last and drop my basket on the floor.
“Aiutami!” I call out. “Help me!”
A porter and a matron come running and they lift me, like circus strongmen, onto a bench. There I gasp and snort, my breath and sweat and the bouncing pains making a shivery rag doll of me. The man grabs a rolling chair, its seat flimsy and the wheels wobbly, and speeds back over to where I’m slumped, trying to stay alert and in control of myself, though I feel like a tormented animal.
“Ecco, signora,” the nurse says, taking me by the elbow.
“That thing will fall asunder if I sit in it!” I stare at the dainty wicker seat, but another pain grips me like a vise and, while I’m frozen inside the scorch of it, they take their opportunity and lift me into the chair. I’m crying out “Oh, oh” and scrambling up the ends of my skirts, for the baby’s head is bulging in my drawers for sure.
The porter rushes the chair along the corridors and the nurse has her hand on my shoulder and it feels like the touch of an angel. I put my fingers over hers and she grabs mine, squeezes.
“You’re safe, signora,” she says.
Our daughter is delivered moments after my back meets the bed and the nurse squeals with delight, lifts the baby high and shows her to me, the long blue and blood-streaked body. I lie back, close my eyes, and send up thanks to God.
“Welcome, a leana,” I whisper, “little child, daughter of ours.” I open my eyes. “Lucia Anna is here, our little Lucy,” I say, hoping that Jim, over in the men’s wing, will somehow hear me.