The Greatest Danger of All Would Be To Do Nothing
Monday, October 22, 1962
President Kennedy appeared on television after the evening news. Alone in her living room, Kate closed her book, walked to the set and turned up the volume. With her husband, Darwin, out to sea, she’d avoided the news as best she could, but she wouldn’t miss the president’s speech.
She took her seat and rested one hand on the book and the other on her rounding belly. “My love,” she said to the baby inside her, “let’s hope this is good news.”
She lit a cigarette from her pack on the end table. She was hungry, but her stomach felt inflated, taut at only sixteen weeks. If Darwin were home, she’d be making steak and potatoes or chicken and rice, but he wasn’t. She wished he were. She missed the food smells. His smell.
As she settled back, she drew on her cigarette and blew smoke at the screen before resting her hand on her belly again. She wanted the president to tell her that everything was okay and they could go back to enjoying their lives. But he looked ill. Kennedy. His face sunken like he’d aged twenty years since the last time she saw him. Still, he looked confident, somehow. Kate sighed. She’d never felt that kind of confidence herself. That was Darwin’s strong suit and he had taken it with him.
As Kennedy talked of missiles—speaking fast enough to stumble at least three times that she counted—Kate smoked one cigarette after the next, intermittently gnawing on her thumb cuticle. Fear lingered in Kennedy’s pauses. She wasn’t supposed to be paying attention to the television until Danny Thomas came on, but instead she had to listen to her president talking about danger.
She’d seen the ballistic missiles before, on the news. Pointy and lethal with Russian writing on their sides. Hearing the president saying “nuclear strike” and then calling it a “definite threat to peace” made acid rise in her throat. All the images from the Defense Department films she’d shown her fourth grade class scrolled through her brain.
The president said, “I have reinforced our base at Guantanamo, evacuated today the dependents of our personnel there.”
Kate stubbed out her cigarette and sat forward. The thought of other Navy wives and their families being rushed out of harm’s way brought a cramp that doubled her over. Darwin’s ship had been sent to patrol the coast of Cuba two months prior. Tampa wasn’t far enough away from the threat of Russian missiles. Soviet invaders. She pushed the thought aside and focused on the president’s words.
“Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead,” Kennedy said. “Months in which both our patience and our will will be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”
The knot in her stomach tightened and tears welled into her eyes. She was unable to move except to say, “Oh my God,” again, and again, maybe a hundred times.
Panic deadened her to the sound of the television. The words “offensive missile sites” and “nuclear strike” reverberated in her head. She vomited black coffee and partially digested pickles onto the coffee table.
***
The rigors of cleaning her mess did nothing to settle Kate’s nerves. She turned off the television and picked up her book, anxious for distraction.
While Darwin was away, Kate occupied her time with books she hadn’t kept out in the open since college. Reading them fed her melancholy, so she only read them when she was alone. Gold leaf lettering had faded from the cover and spine, eliminating the author’s name and title. Text filled every page leaving no white space, no margins. There were three such books, all from her college days: Old English poetry, Greek tragedies, and this unidentified book that blended history and philosophy. She kept them in a hatbox on the top shelf in her closet because Darwin hated the way reading them made her act complicated and morose.
These books hadn’t been part of her college curriculum. She was never tested on lessons from these books. She’d read them anyway. Her physics professor used to sit in her study carrel on the third floor of the library while she read and everyone else was at dinner. Each time, he’d ease his hand up her skirt as she read these books. He’d toy with the edges of her panties and trace the outlines on her thighs before pulling them aside and inserting a chalk-dusted finger into her. Kate never pulled away or complained. She didn’t love the man or want to go any farther, but it was impossible to control the intoxication that went along with the finger inside her, his hot breath on her neck, the risk of getting caught. Now as she read, her own hand traced the outlines of her panties on her thighs. Her own fingers pulled them aside and entered her as her reading slowed and her breath quickened.
She read a line she hadn’t thought about in years: The animals turn over the nests, but they find no eggs. She stopped reading. Her hand fell out of her panties. In early medieval culture they’d killed their young to protect them from barbarians. When she’d first read that line in the library back in college, when she was supposed to be writing a term paper on Byzantine paintings, she’d found the idea of killing a child radical and horrific. Now, it seemed simply a way of protecting children from rape, mutilation, slavery, and murder.
***
The reading made her tired. The paste in her mouth from vomiting still stung her throat. She went upstairs, which provided no comfort. Everything in the bedroom was different when Darwin was away, and now the room seemed bigger and colder. She couldn’t stand his side of the bed being empty. One day, she’d laid out his best suit right on the bed, where he would lie if he were home and had passed out after a party. His polished shoes turned out sideways at the foot of the bed. His tie, perfectly knotted, made contact with the collar of his starched white shirt only inches from her lipstick stains where her mouth had landed every night.
She stood in front of her closet. Of the dozen cocktail dresses waiting for the events on base Darwin would take her to, she loved the black one the most. She slept in it every night. Next to Darwin’s suit. Tonight, though, she needed the cheeriness of red chiffon to have any chance of getting some rest.
Sleep didn’t come. She reached out to touch the suit. Worry weighed on her chest and made her cough. She coughed twice more and sat up, then picked up the suit coat beside her and wiped her mouth with a sleeve. She pulled the sleeve hard, then harder, until she heard a rip in the stitching at the shoulder. She stopped for a moment, but then pulled even harder, tearing it from the coat. She dropped the sleeve and grabbed the pocket—ripped it clean off. She made her way onto her knees and pulled the pants apart at the seam. Her heart pounded and it made her feel alive, like she was saving Darwin. Protecting him from a death brought on by boiling in the nuclear sea.
From her knees, she shook a pillow out of its case and stuffed the shredded suit, the tie, and both shoes inside. She fluffed her chiffon after she scooted off the bed. With the stuffed pillowcase in her hand, she trotted downstairs and crammed the wad into the garbage can beneath the kitchen sink.
She adjusted the shoulders of her dress as she stood and made her way into the living room. As she took a seat on the couch, she smoothed the fabric around her legs. She laid back and picked up her book. Within minutes, the book rested on her belly as she drifted off.
***
Kate called in sick to work the next morning. The kids were decent enough, but not exceptionally bright. Though a child here or there operated at a high level, not a single sublime mind existed in the bunch. And she could only do so much with the rest of them, especially these days. If she were forced to look at her classroom full of panic-stricken fourth graders today, she only would see them collectively engulfed in flames.
Kate dressed in slacks and a cotton blouse she didn’t bother to tuck in. She had no appetite for breakfast and couldn’t face the news printed in the paper or broadcast on TV. She paced between the bed and the bathroom door, where her bath towel hung to dry. She stopped, unmade the bed, and climbed back in with all her clothes on. The fan oscillated and billowed the top sheet. She pulled it to her chin.
In the silence of that hiding spot, she heard three long blows of a coach’s whistle. She sprang up. Raced to the open window. The last time she’d heard that sound, a marching band broke into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” She hoped there was a band on her street right now because a marching band might mean a parade, and a parade is a celebration. There was nothing she wanted to celebrate more than the end to all this bullshit with Soviet Cuba.
At the window, she didn’t see a marching band, but rather her neighbor, Sam Allen, who stood on his stoop facing his house. He blew his whistle again and then hollered, “Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.” He held up a stopwatch as if to show time speeding by, but there was no one standing in the open doorway.
Kate ran downstairs and through the front door as Donna Allen and their three kids scrambled outside, each dragging a yellow Samsonite down the steps and into the blue Mercury parked at the curb. Donna made it to the car first and helped each child load their suitcase into the trunk.
Adrenaline erupted in Kate’s veins with the heat of lava. The kids should be in school. Sam should be at work. “Oh, my God,” Kate screamed. “What’s happening, Sam?” She sank to her knees, hands clasped in front of her though her mind offered no prayers to pray. Instead, she hugged her belly and waited for the flash of light they’d been trained to expect.
“No. Oh, no, Kate,” Sam said, trotting across a lawn made brown by the scorching Florida sun. “Shhh. No. Don’t worry,” he said, kneeling unsteadily on one knee. He placed a hand on her shoulder. Light pressure, but with reassurance in it. “No. This is just a drill.”
Kate went slack and rested back on her heels. “Oh, thank God.”
Sam rose and reached out a hand to help her up. “A woman in your condition shouldn’t be sitting on the ground.”
“Don’t touch me, you inconsiderate bastard!” Kate’s fingers pushed through the grass as she made her way to her feet. “You could have given me a heart attack.”
Donna and the kids trotted over from the car, all in various stages of inquiry into Kate’s health and comfort.
“Everything’s fine here,” Sam said, motioning for them to quiet down. “Just a little misunderstanding.”
“I’m sorry, everyone,” Kate said.
The strained face of the youngest child, a little girl of four with puffy cheeks and orange hair, broke Kate’s heart. She was just a couple years younger than the children Kate led through the duck-and-cover drills like Bert the Turtle from the Defense Department films, but, fortunately, most of them didn’t know what it was all about—didn’t know the desks wouldn’t protect them from rainfall, let alone gamma radiation. The Allen kids might. All three of these children had been fed fear with their corn flakes every morning.
Donna towered amid the children as she navigated to Kate’s right. A head taller than Kate and rail-thin in a pressed white dress, she put an unlit cigarette to Kate’s lips and asked, “You okay?”
“I can’t believe it’s still so hot.”
“The only difference between July and October down here is the holidays. But it’s more than just the heat.”
Kate accepted the lit match and puffed to light the cigarette. “Even if I didn’t have the morning sickness, I wouldn’t look like Jackie Kennedy today.”
“If my Sam was away,” Donna said, “I’m sure I’d be a complete wreck.”
Kate’s mouth ran dry the way it did every time people condescended. She hit her cigarette to fill her mouth with smoke and to fill the moment with silence. As she exhaled, she said, “Darwin’s absences come with the territory.”
“Well, you just keep the faith, sweetie. He’ll be home soon.”
Kate poked her shoe into a cluster of fallen oak leaves. “If he comes home.”
“Oh, my.” Donna covered her slack mouth with her fingertips.
Kate felt a stab of guilt in her chest and mirrored Donna’s movement. “I don’t know why I said that. My God, that was terrible.” Kate looked past Donna’s face, toward the sky, as if she might see his ship somewhere in the blue. “Of course he’ll come home.” She looked the woman in the eye. “He will come home. Right, Donna?”
“Of course he will.” Donna and Sam said in unison.
“And, if we do get the alarm,” Sam said, brushing grass off his knee, “you can ride with us to the shelter.”
Kate’s lungs felt empty. Deflated somehow. She said, “The shelter?” in a labored sigh, while in her mind she saw the black and yellow sign on the cinderblock wall of Tampa Springs Elementary. To most people it signified safety within, but to Kate, the words “Fallout” and “Shelter” merely advertised the threat that made such shelters necessary.
“The school,” he nodded. “Your school, Kate.”
She couldn’t imagine how she’d get by in a shelter or if she could even sleep on a cot in her own classroom. Even if she was inside when the missiles hit, she couldn’t stay inside forever and the fallout would linger for decades or longer, killing all the livestock and vegetation. The food supply would be decimated, Darwin had said. States outside the radiation zone wouldn’t risk trucking in supplies. They would all eventually starve, even if they turned to cannibalism. Kate died a little inside whenever she thought of that.
“Oh, I wish Darwin was here,” Kate said.
“No offense, Kate,” Sam said, “but I sleep better knowing men like him are out there keeping us safe.”
The thought of Darwin so vulnerable on his ship—a sitting duck—brought tears to her eyes. “He’s one man, on one ship, Sam. He should be here with me.”
“I know. But I’m glad he’s wielding a sword on our behalf. And just remember that there’s room for you in the car, should that time come.” He rounded up his family and helped them retrieve their suitcases on the way back into their house.
Kate exhaled, hugged her arms across her belly, and stared at the family. That little girl looked genuinely scared and tired. What kind of a way was that for a child to live?
***
After gathering her purse and keys, Kate backed the car out of the detached garage and drove south through columns of palm trees flanking flat roads. Heat vapors, suspended by the thick wetness in the air, shimmered in the sun, made the road fuzzy in the distance. She’d moved here with Darwin in March, but her blood hadn’t thinned enough to be comfortable inside or out.
Darwin’s ship, the U.S.S. McCreight, was homeported in Port Tampa, though there was no official Navy base there. Instead, all the shopping and administrative details like ID cards and banking had to be done at MacDill Air Force Base.
She drove toward the base, not for a doctor’s appointment or with intentions of shopping for groceries, or getting her hair done or running any other sundry errands. The only people she knew were either schoolteachers or officers’ wives. All of her family and friends remained in Connecticut. Everything she knew was up there, back home, including the house she’d been born in and had lived in all through college, where Darwin had courted her.
Kate turned off Dale Mabry Highway just as the base’s entrance came into view. She drove east down an unfamiliar street and passed rows of cinderblock duplexes and apartment buildings. Two streets over, she found an intersection with a stoplight and turned into a parking lot outside a strip mall. With no idea what she was going to do, this was as good as any place to start.
The odor of gasoline exhaust hung heavy in the air. She tried the grocery store first, but it didn’t feel right—too many men around. Some were employees and others were retiree husbands. She walked next door to the beauty salon, but the smell of chemicals hit her so strongly she had to back out of the place with her hand over her mouth to hold down the sick. Outside, she took a few deep breaths. She thought about having a cigarette but decided her stomach wasn’t up to it at the moment.
Instead, she walked to the end of the strip mall and into a laundromat, where the smell of soap and wet lint hung thick in the lifeless air. A woman stood at each end, attending to their business. A couple of old washing machines sloshed water and it seemed so inviting that she wanted to reach her hands in and cleanse herself. The notion formed a lump in her throat and she turned to leave, but hesitated to take a step toward the door because the sound of a pair of tennis shoes thudding against the spinning drum and the glass of a dryer door caught her ear. Over and over they pounded, as if they demanded release from their confines and the heat.
Kate settled her hand on her belly and walked up to the woman near the far wall. She had curlers in her hair and folded towels with a cigarette between her lips. Kate’s hands shook at her sides as she stopped and reached out to balance herself on one of the dormant washing machines. “I’m in a family way,” she said to the woman.
“Congratulations,” the woman said, over a stack of folded towels. She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and smiled, as if to end the conversation.
Kate didn’t smile back. Instead, she looked down at flakes of rusted metal chipping off the machine by her feet. The taste of iron coated her tongue. “Well,” she said, “it’s not something to celebrate, if you know what I mean?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said with a wide smile. Without looking at Kate, she placed her folded towels into a basket at her feet and tossed the rest of her unfolded laundry on top. “Children are the future.” She placed her soap powder into the basket and picked it up, then made her way out the door without once making eye contact.
Before the door was fully closed, the woman at the other end half-whispered, “You looking for an option?” She wore a cheap cotton housedress with a bra strap sagging around one arm, her hair red enough to make Kate think of radiation.
“Would that be horrible?” Kate said, walking toward her.
“But you’re married.” The redhead pointed at Kate’s ring.
“It’s complicated,” Kate said, stuffing her hand into the hip pocket of her brown slacks. “It’s just this…I, I don’t know.”
“He certainly didn’t give us any reason to feel safe on television last night. I’ll give you that,” the redhead said. “I don’t know why I’m washing these clothes when we could all wake up dead tomorrow.”
The flutter in Kate’s womb reverberated all the way up to her shoulders. She braced herself by leaning her palms on the closed lid of a washing machine and wept. Her stomach rolled like the tennis shoes in the dryer.
“I understand,” the woman said, draping her arm around Kate’s shoulders. “Stop crying now.” The woman looked over her shoulder toward the door before adding, “I’ve had to do it. Once.”
Kate sprang back a full step, her own motion as startling as the woman’s confession.
“That’s why you’re here, ain’t it?” The woman looked Kate up and down. “Don’t pretend with me,” the woman said, pouring soap powder into her machine. “Your nails are clean and I seen the car you drove here in. But that don’t bother me none.” She closed the lid and twisted the machine’s dial. Water rushed from an unseen pipe. “That woman from TV, what’s her name? The one from Romper Room?
“Sherri?”
“Yeah! She had it done a couple months back. And she must make more than both of us put together.”
“But she went to Europe to do it,” Kate said. “In a hospital. Where it’s legal.” Kate wondered about the methods they used there. Were they modern? Did they hurt?
“Go on to Europe then.” She pronounced it u-rope. “What do I care?”
“Was it bad?” Kate said, reaching out to touch the woman’s arm.
“Best decision I could’ve made.” The woman pulled her arm away and rested it across her laundry basket, revealing a missing finger on her left hand. “Seven kids is hard enough.” The stub was smooth, the scar worn down from use.
Kate reached for her purse. “I’ll pay you ten dollars to tell me how to go about this.”
The woman fished an old grocery store receipt from her purse and wrote a phone number on the back. “Don’t mention my name unless you have to.”
“I don’t know your name,” Kate said.
“Good. Now hand over that ten-spot and let’s part strangers.”
***
The next day, Kate stayed inside with the drapes drawn and drank from a bottle of gin. She usually brought donuts for the teachers’ lounge on Wednesdays, but she had called Betty in the principal’s office to arrange a substitute teacher for the rest of the week, and maybe the week after, too. Betty didn’t ask any questions, and Kate volunteered nothing extra. She then spent the rest of the day sitting on her bed in her red gown and staring at Darwin’s side of the bed. The room felt hollow around her. The world stood quiet. No voices or sounds of brakes squeaking at the stop sign outside made it feel like everyone in town was hiding.
She drank again. Darwin wouldn’t know the difference between the original bottle of gin or her twentieth. As long as she disposed of the empty bottles and receipts, he would never know to judge her. And if the Russians bomb us, it won’t matter anyway. She composed herself, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and then rubbed her belly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll protect you.”
A clattering and scraping outside startled her. Since the president’s speech, every vehicle squeak sounded like a woman screaming, and planes overhead made her duck and seek cover. Her face and chest flushed and she rolled from the bed into a ball on the floor until she recognized the noise as the garbage truck rattling cans along its sides and on the street.
She was tired from the work of fear. The worry. She worried for herself. Her baby. She worried if Darwin would make it back alive.
In the afternoon, she walked into the kitchen. The linoleum was cool beneath her bare feet as she smoothed the wrinkled receipt from the woman in the laundromat to find the number legible in blue ink.
After dialing, she slid down the wall and sat on the kitchen floor—the red chiffon dress pooled around her, the phone cord stretched down the wall, receiver pressed to her ear. A woman’s voice said, “Yes?”
“I was given this number.”
“What number?”
Kate stretched the phone cord tight and let it spring with slack. “The one I called.”
“Who gave it to you?” the voice asked.
“I don’t know.” Kate’s finger traced the pattern in the linoleum. “A woman.”
“What woman?”
“She wouldn’t give me her name, but she was missing a finger on her left hand. She said you helped her.”
“Helped her how?”
“With a delicate matter.”
“Delicate?”
Kate choked up for a minute, prepared herself. “I’m expecting.”
“Good for you, lady.”
“No. I’m calling to inquire about an abor—”
“Who gave you this number?” The woman’s voice was quick, but not harsh.
“I paid a woman twenty dollars for it.” Kate exaggerated the amount in the hope it would convey her urgency. “I need the same help she got. I’ve got to protect. With an abor—”
“They call it termination,” the woman on the phone said.
Acid burned in Kate’s throat. She touched her belly and bit her lower lip. “The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing. The president said that.”
“What’s that?”
Kate swallowed. “Can you help me like you helped the woman with the missing finger?”
The woman exhaled, air whistling through her nose. “We can get you in at nine o’clock next Wednesday.”
“Next Wednesday?” Kate felt her head shaking. “No. Now. I need it done as soon as possible.”
“How far along are you?”
“Almost five months,” she said, again exaggerating for effect.
“You have plenty of time.”
“I don’t think you understand.” Kate held the phone in one hand and chewed on her index finger cuticle.
“It’s natural to want it over with as soon as possible, but we’re a small staff. If you need faster attention, I recommend you keep searching for someone with the availability you’re looking for.”
“There’s no time for this.” Kate slapped the floor with the palm of her free hand and then took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just not confident that we’ll make it through the night.”
“Are you suicidal?”
Kate raised her shoulder to press the phone tighter to her ear. She held up her wet index finger and looked at it a moment
“Is that what you are?”
“Will that get me in sooner?”
“All right, listen. You can come at five o’clock Saturday evening.”
Kate didn’t reply.
“There’s a tailor shop just off Seventh Avenue,” the woman said. “Down Fourteenth Street. Bring eight—no, ten—twenty-dollar bills.”
Kate reached up, retrieved a pen from the counter and wrote everything on the wrinkled receipt resting on her bare thigh.
“Don’t write this down.”
“I can’t remember all the numbers right now.”
“Bring that piece of paper with you when you come. And you’ll need someone to help you get home afterward. Choose someone you trust to say as little as possible.”
“Do you do this sort of thing often?”
“I don’t do anything. There’s a doctor. And he’s always busy. So relax. He knows what he’s doing. Just remember to bring the money. And that paper.”
Despite the click on the other end, Kate stayed seated with her knees tucked up around her belly and the phone pressed to her ear.
***
On Saturday, Kate parked down Seventh Avenue in Ybor City and walked. There was no need to look over her shoulder, because she didn’t know anybody on this side of town. And more importantly, no one knew her. The streets teemed with men in straw fedoras and guayabera shirts—most of them smoking cigars. She’d never been to this part of Tampa before and she couldn’t be sure if the men around her were cigar rollers on break or musicians or gangsters.
She hugged her purse to her chest as she turned off Seventh Avenue and headed down an alley. No breeze wafted that far off the bay and temperatures lingered in the eighties. Sweat beaded on the small of her back and trailed into the waistband of her girdle. Summer had no end here.
“The only difference between July and October is the holidays,” Donna had said.
This part of Tampa felt like a million miles from her part of the city. This area felt dangerous. Dirty. Perfect. She didn’t care if the locals saw her as a puta or a debutante. If she read their faces correctly, they knew she was in their part of town for the same reason as all the other puta debutantes from south Tampa.
Kate’s heel caught in a crack between cobblestones. Her ankle rolled and she reached to balance herself on a garbage can. A cat screeched and hissed. Kate jumped back on her good foot as the cat bolted down the alley. She felt bad for the cat. It was cute, black and thin, like the one depicted in the Halloween decorations on the walls in her school. The shelter.
Kate straightened. She couldn’t imagine anyone looking forward to Halloween.
She bounced her weight on the affected foot. A dull soreness throbbed beneath her skin somewhere in the anklebone.
She followed the directions to the back door of a two-story building with a tailor shop on the bottom and an apartment above. The alley was clean, as if it had been brushed and ironed like one of the suits in the tailor shop. But it was still an alley, and it made Kate’s skin itch. The nuns who taught her in high school would light a thousand candles if they knew what Kate was doing right now.
But Kate had seen On the Beach. She’d heard a Russian scientist had confirmed every element. And what about Japan? She’d been only six years old then, but she’d seen pictures, read articles. The only people to survive their burns were crushed by falling debris. She clenched her teeth and stood taller, thrust her arms down by her sides, fists balled. She thought about Stalingrad, where they ate the children, and the concentration camps, where they made lampshades out of baby skin. With that anger she pounded her battle-ready fist on the door.
***
A moment later, a woman with blonde hair cut like a boy opened the door. She held the door close to her, “You alone?”
Kate crossed her hands in front of the bulge in her belly. “Yes.”
“You’re supposed to have somebody with you.” The woman spoke with a New England accent. “You’ll need help getting home.”
“She’ll be here,” Kate lied.
“You brought the money?”
Kate pulled an envelope filled with twenty-dollar bills from a pocket hidden in the lining of her purse. Her nails were jagged from having been gnawed. She was barely able to get in good air. “The paper I wrote the instructions on is in there, too.”
The woman took the envelope and led Kate up the stairs.
Kate’s sore ankle made each step harder to climb than the last. The top stair opened onto a landing opposite the apartment’s living room, where two women and a man stood in front of a television. Both women were middle-aged and the heavier of the two hugged the thinner woman and whispered what Kate assumed was encouragement.
“Is there any news?” Kate called into the room.
All three turned to look at her, but none answered.
The blonde woman took Kate’s hand, leading her to the doorway of a bedroom. The bed was elevated and had stirrups attached to one end, facing a medicine cabinet with a padlock dangling open.
From the doorway she heard the voice of a man speaking on the radio. She couldn’t hear his words, but his inflection and rapid delivery could only mean more bad news. Kate rolled the tension out of her shoulders.
The woman handed her three blue pills and a paper cup with water and watched her swallow them. “Get undressed. Put on that gown,” she said and pointed to the oak coat rack opposite her. “Make sure the opening is in the front. Then remove all your jewelry.” She threw the paper cup into the trash can. “The nurse will be in shortly.” As she left the room, she pulled the door closed behind her.
“Excuse me,” Kate called out.
The woman poked her head around the door. “Yes?”
“Can you leave the door open so I can hear the radio, in case there’s any news?”
“The world’s going to change enough inside these four walls. Don’t worry yourself with the rest.” She closed the door gently.
Kate did as she’d been told and removed her dress, folding it and placing it on a chair, beneath which she placed her shoes, side by side. She put on the gown and unclasped her bracelet, held it in her hand. On the front was a plate with her name engraved on the outside and Darwin’s name on the curved underside. A gift when they were sixteen and suddenly going steady. She’d worn it every day since—took it off only to shower.
She took it off now and tucked it into her purse, which she placed on top of her shoes and then slowly climbed onto the bed, between the stirrups.
***
While on the bed waiting for the doctor, the smells of camphor and medicaments she couldn’t name filled the room and seemed to accelerate the effects of the pills she’d swallowed. Unlike her regular doctor, this one didn’t have a ground-floor office in a well-traveled part of the city, nor did he have any diplomas on the walls. Instead, there were paintings of hillside pastures with fence lines in each one. All could be scenes from her idyllic childhood summers at their cabin in Maine. But each painting contained dark splotches—half-seen cattle and people—and this frightened her. She looked away.
Outside the window, a wailing cat reached a fever pitch as it fought or fucked with increasing urgency. From inside the room on the second floor, there was no way to know if it was the same cat she’d seen earlier.
A few moments later, a woman in an apron with Woolworth’s scripted on the front walked in. She had gray hair and eyeglasses as big as stop signs. “The doctor will want to find your feet up in the stirrups.”
“I figured I’d wait until the last possible moment.”
“With the sedative we gave you? You’ll be asleep before you feel the draft.”
Kate placed her hand over her mouth while she laughed.
The woman in the apron pointed. “You’ll have to take off that ring.”
Kate had forgotten it was there. As if it was part of her own flesh instead of having been slipped over her finger while standing before a minister. Her palms were sweaty and the gold band slipped off her finger with little effort. The woman took it. Kate watched as she slid it into the opening in Kate’s purse.
The room began to swirl. She saw the picture of a waterfall on a calendar on the wall beside the door. Could swear she heard the water flowing. It began purring. The next second, her eyelids were leaden.
Darwin had offered to resign his commission when he learned she was pregnant. “A baby is coming. The father should be here to meet him when he arrives.”
“We’ll be fine,” Kate had said. “You’ll probably get back here in plenty of time to fetch me pickles and ice cream.”
“I want to have a dozen babies with you,” he’d said, pulling her toward him with his arm around her waist. “You know that?”
Kate had kissed him and led him upstairs.
***
The nurse put her hand on Kate’s shoulder. “Afterward, the doctor will give you a bottle of pills. Take them. If you experience extreme pain or bleeding, report to the emergency room at once.”
Kate pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her head felt hazy from the sedation. “Stop.” She tugged her gown off her shoulders. “The deal’s off. Where’s my clothes?”
“Now just relax,” the nurse said, spreading her thin arms to guide Kate back down.
Kate swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her brain swam for a moment, but she steadied herself. It felt as if the walls were starting to fall in on her.
“You shouldn’t be moving. The doctor will be here any second.”
“I can’t do this!”
“It’s natural to panic,” the nurse said.
“I’m not panicking. I’m just changing my mind.”
“We don’t offer refunds.”
“I don’t care about the money. I just want to go.”
“We only do this for girls who really want it. But you’ve been sedated and will need to lie down for a couple hours in any event.”
Just then, the doctor entered. He had to duck through the doorway. He towered over Kate, casting her in shadow, emanating smells of Brylcreem and talcum. He wore a green smock with the matching mask tucked down around his throat, his face forlorn.
“What’s the matter, Robert?” the nurse asked.
The doctor sighed. “They shot down one of our planes.”
“Oh my God,” Kate said, lying back on the bed. “Everything is in motion now.”
“We don’t know that,” the doctor said, more to the nurse than to Kate.
“Go watch the news,” the nurse said. “This one’s backing out.”
The man’s nose hooked like a gardening tool. The look of it comforted Kate. A man with such a defect surely must be good at his work.
“No,” Kate said. “The greatest danger of all is to do nothing. I trust you, Doctor.” She leaned back onto her elbows. Placed her feet in the stirrups. She rubbed her hands on her belly. “I will not let you suffer.”
“Are you sure?” He held the strings of his surgical mask.
Kate nodded. She trusted his nose. Her father had had just such a nose.
***
Kate woke the next morning, in her own bed, to the sounds of hollering and car horns. She had no memory of getting there and was momentarily surprised she wasn’t in her red chiffon dress, but rather in her yellow cotton nightgown. Cramps in her lower abdomen and soreness between her legs when she tried to roll over stopped her for a moment. The drugs had worn off and it was all coming back to her.
She made her way out of bed and was reminded of her twisted ankle. Limping on the ankle, she parted the window blinds. The Allen family next door and all the other neighbors jumped and danced in the street. They banged garbage can lids together. Kate navigated the stairs on the tender ankle and made it to the living room, where she turned on the television. Men talked rapidly, and she could get only every other word or so. Her first thought was the effects of the drugs made the men appear happy, but then she heard more people celebrating outside her house with car horns and fireworks. Her stomach hurt and her mouth was dry, but she leaned in toward the television until she heard that Khrushchev had promised to remove the missiles.
Each eruption of noise outside her windows made her skin prickle, as if snakes slithered atop her bones. She grew weightless for a moment, the wood floor cool beneath her bare feet. Relief streamed from her with an exhalation so complete that she had to sit down on the sofa. As she took her next breath, pain gripped her and she doubled over. Through the pain, she tried to remember where her wedding ring might be. Her breathing came shallow. With her eyes clamped shut, the joyfulness in the street grew louder. Kate eased herself to lie back on the sofa. She picked up her threadbare book and rested it on her hollow belly.