11
Baby Steps Forward
At least I was surrounded by the safety of family when I got the news of Robert’s condition. Mumps! Infertility from mumps isn’t certain, of course. There are miracles. It’s the absence of Robert’s telling me that hurts. I can hardly write of it here, the fracture in the possibility of the joys of motherhood so deep. I can make excuses for him—he didn’t want to assume we couldn’t conceive; didn’t want to bring up an issue needlessly. Still.
December 28, 1878
The joys of motherhood” had in that moment of my father’s words slipped into sorrow. Mary put her arms around me, held me. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll be fine. There’s nothing certain, is there, Daddy?”
“Well—”
“I’m sure Robert didn’t mention it because he didn’t want me to be discouraged. He adores me.”
“Yes, he does.”
“I . . . I think I want to be alone now.”
I excused myself and went up to my old room that was now the bedroom that Robert and I occupied. I wanted to be by myself and had forgotten that he would be there, at my desk.
Upon hearing me come in, he spoke without looking up. “Wait just a moment, Dell, while I finish this section.”
A moment could mean anywhere from five minutes to two hours when Robert was writing. I didn’t respond. I sat myself up on my old bed, pillows behind my head, and stared forward. Oak branches scraped against the window and a rainbow formed from the sunlight, reflecting against the cut-glass vase on the dresser. After waiting ten minutes or so, I left. He never heard me leave. At the front door, I donned my rubber boots, muffler, and hood, threw my cape over my shoulders, and opened the outside door.
“I’ll go with you.” Mary set her crocheting aside and stood as I held the door against the cold. “Mother and Hattie are back. They can watch Christina.”
“I’d rather go alone.”
She stopped and the old lab, Casey, bumped right into her.
“I’ll take Casey if he wants to go.”
“He always wants to go. You’re sure being alone is a good idea? Where’s Robert?”
“Working on his book. I’m fine,” I lied. “Please.”
She nodded assent.
“Come on, Casey. Let’s see if we can find a rabbit in the snow.”
I knew I needed to speak to Robert. First, I’d gather information from my father’s medical books. We could visit specialists, of course. But the greatest pain came from Robert’s not sharing. When I didn’t conceive and wondered out loud what was wrong with me, he’d remained silent. That’s not true. He had held me and told me not to worry, that we’d have a fine, full life until that time arrived. Perhaps he didn’t know that infertility could happen. Yes, I wanted to name his betrayal ignorance, not willful omission.
Casey left the path shoveled by the good citizens of Marengo, and I followed his footprints in the light snow. He searched for rabbits, I thought, or maybe he wanted to see different terrain, since this was the route my mother often walked him. We were both on new paths. All the visions I had of seeing myself with child, carrying an infant in my arms, juggling marriage and parenthood—all I had imagined drifted away like feathers on a windy day. No substance to them at all.
Jingle bells rang on the carriages going by. Laughter whispered into the dusk, and I felt such longing I thought my heart would break. I stopped, leaned my back against an oak, my cape so thick I couldn’t feel the bark. The cold air stung my cheeks and made me stay in that moment rather than morosely sinking into self-pity. The dog stopped suddenly, turned, then limped back toward me. “You’re better at noticing my movements than Robert is.” I scratched his head again. “Maybe I’ll get a dog. Except dogs would be even more difficult to travel with than a child. Come on, let’s head back.”
The gas lighter approached, lifted his long-handled starter to the lanterns, and light burst onto the path. He tipped his hat and went on down the street, illuminating as he went.
Casey barked then, and I looked up. In the distance, I saw a man whose gait I knew was Robert’s. He walked fast and then started to wave and I could see his eyes above the scarf that wound around his chin and nose. “Dell!” I waved back and as he reached me, breathless, he said, “I’m so sorry. Your father told me. I—I have no words.”
“Did you know that mumps could cause infertility? Did you keep it from me?”
“Only out of my own fear. I didn’t know until after we married how incredibly important it was for you, for us, to have children. I should have. I’m dense. I’m really dense.”
“You are that.”
“But I remembered when . . .” He hesitated. “When Carrie was ill, I remember you telling her she’d get better and that, yes, she might not be able to have children but that that wasn’t the end of the world. There were lots of orphaned children who need help. Lots of babies whose mothers or fathers couldn’t keep them. You made such a convincing case that I thought that, well—”
“I was encouraging a sick woman, Robert.”
“But didn’t you mean what you said?”
“Then, yes. For her. And perhaps I will again, for me, but it is a blow.”
He put his elbow through mine, making sure my gloved hand didn’t pull out of the muff. “I’ll work a lifetime to make it up to you, I will. Anything you want. Anything.”
“Right now I want to go home, and when you leave for Omaha on the train, I want to be with you and not left behind like last Christmas.”
“Consider it done.”
He held me then as we stood beneath the lantern light. But something had changed. I saw a crossroads and how I dealt with it I knew would make a difference for our entire lives. The youthful wound was deep, but I remembered a word in my father’s medical book—incarn. It meant to grow new flesh. That’s what I’d have to do now and hope that every time I saw a child, it wouldn’t reopen this wound.
After Christmas, we stayed in an Omaha hotel a few months, then moved on to Denver, where Robert’s latest published article raised talk of immigration. It was that “army conquering a wilderness as it follows the trail of the pioneer” that made me wonder if the needs of those many people could make me forget my hopes of motherhood in the more traditional sense.
“I didn’t expect my work to be controversial.” Robert held the Denver Rocky newspaper in his hand while I packed us for the wilds of Idaho, Robert’s new data-gathering site. The Union Pacific wanted another pamphlet on that area. The Montana Territorial government had allocated money for more copies of Robert’s book about Montana, and there was much discussion about the good and bad of luring so many “tenderfoots” west.
“People want commerce, but they also hate to give up their way of life with new people arriving.” He read a few of the letters to the editor, including the one chastising that “author Robert Strahorn.”
“Change threatens people, Robert. And you’re whipping up change like Mama whips up egg whites. They’ll make a fine meringue, but meringue can go soft and sticky in the right conditions.”
“I guess the UP is getting what it wanted. Interest in the West. They’ll have to live with the demands that’ll come for running the tracks ‘through my town. No, my town!’” He acted out a town meeting with raised fists, depending on which town got chosen for that short line.
“Let’s hope we don’t get run out on those rails when they arrive to a site that rivals another. People won’t take kindly to that rebuff.” I had no idea how prescient I could be.
I tried to put the news of Robert’s mumps and the repercussions from my mind as we rode the train west. I’d focus on the adventure. It might have even been then that I began to think about those developing towns full of hopeful pioneers and how I might mother them rather than children.
We grabbed the thrice-weekly stage one morning later that summer and approached the many soda-laden springs after days of travel toward Idaho. More than one hundred pools of water gave the place its name Soda Springs. A pungent smell wafted upward from some circles; others looked clear as crystal, no steam above any of them, merely tiny bubbles.
Our guide was another military man originally from Boston but now the owner of a lovely home in view of the sulphur springs that had become a kind of oasis for travelers on what people called the Oregon Trail. The Codmans had traveled all over the world with Mr. Codman as a former sea captain, and these were the waters he and his wife wanted as their summer view. No steam—so no bathing in this place like the hot springs we’d visited in Montana—but good water for horses and laundry. Some pools cast off strange smells.
“Check that pool over there.” The captain directed my dear Pard toward a pond maybe five feet across. “You leave your mount right there and take in a nice deep breath at that spring. Breathe in. You’ll like it.” The captain winked at me.
Robert always listened to men with “Captain” or “General” before their names. He leaned his lanky frame over and inhaled.
His legs buckled under him and he fell in.
“Robert!” I shouted, then lifted my skirt over the hook on my saddle, catching it as I dismounted. By the time I reached the spring, the now very chastened captain had pulled Robert out by his boots and my husband stood dripping wet and coughing up a storm. “What were you thinking, Captain?”
The captain had been fast on his feet, I gave him that. He’d pushed past the ammonia smell and had Robert back in seconds. Robert coughed and vomited.
“I wasn’t thinking, ma’am. I’ll never joke with that again. Didn’t think the fumes would fell him like that.”
“Don’t be hard on him, Dell. He didn’t mean it. I—I’ve had tuberculosis.” Another assault on fertility and the lack of frankness in our marriage. The immediate demanded my attention.
“You could have drowned.” I glared at Captain Codman, who kept his distance from me. I clucked my tongue in disgust. Silly men, one playing jokes, the other brushing it off. “Let’s get him back. Dry clothes are in order for you both, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, ma’am. My Tilly will rustle up some Boston chocolate for him. You’d make a good captain, Missus.”
I was in no mood for cajoling.
Sometimes Robert’s charm and the way he had of deferring to others to inflate their ego led people to believe he was a tenderfoot. My Pard may have behaved as such by doing what the captain asked. I’m sure that old captain would call me hawkish for being a shadow watching over my husband, but Robert could be naïve. I’d just seen another example of it.
He dripped, wet. His horse wasn’t too happy to be so close to the smell, and the animal skittered, taking a bit of time and attention from a sound we heard next: a woman’s voice, frightened.
“Lacy, you come back here.”
A small girl, maybe five, her thin dress flowing out behind her as though she raced the wind, had darted away from her mother’s hands. We saw the child dance toward the same pool that had overcome Robert.
“Lacy!” Her mother deserted her scrub board, ran.
“Can you grab her, Captain?” I shouted.
Curiosity, the lure of the fascinating, maybe even seeing Robert plunge in, then be pulled safely out, all tumbled the child into the fetid water. The captain was right there, held his breath as he plunged in. I prayed for that child, that mother.
The captain pushed her out into her waiting mother’s arms. But it was too late. She had aspirated the noxious stuff into her lungs and lay limp, her bare toes looking so cold.
“No, no, no, no.” I heard that mother’s words for days after that, as her husband, then perhaps a brother and a sister-in-law, swarmed around her. One man took the child from her arms. Tears marked his dusty cheeks as she thanked him.
I hear her still, echoing in my own lament, that cry of wishing for what isn’t. We each mourned the shortness of life but also railed at what we could not control. I struggled with what it all meant, the death of innocents. What was this desire to go forward into a new land, to pioneer, and how would this mother, like mothers past, put the death of this child to rest so that she could move on? How did any of us come to terms with disaster and disappointment; keep ourselves from despair?
There was nothing we could do now. But on the ride to the captain’s quarters these thoughts filled me when it should have been gratitude that my husband was safe. His larger body (than the little girl’s) and the fact that he had fainted from the fumes before falling in likely kept him from greater damage to his lungs.
“What’s happened, John?” Captain Codman’s wife welcomed us and Robert’s wet clothes; her husband’s too. Their home displayed seafaring motifs.
“One terrible disaster and one rescue from a joke gone bad,” the captain told her.
She looked at me and nodded toward our room. “I’ll have hot water brought in. And chocolate.” She gave orders to a housemaid while her dear captain put his head to hers in what must have been a familiar gesture of affection for this childless couple. She lingered but a moment, then returned to her hospitable duties. She was all generosity and grace as she wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry for whatever has made you all sad.” She didn’t try to cheer us up as I might have. She then walked me arm in arm to our room, gave us hot chocolate and a blanket for Robert that I soon wrapped around him after helping him strip from his soaked clothes.
We waited for the steaming water of a bath. “I’m sorry, Dell. Sorry for everything.”
I put my head to his and we sat that way, breathing in each other’s breath. I knew he spoke not of this latest episode but of the greater loss.
“It would be too difficult to have a child now anyway,” I said. “They’re hard to keep safe and—”
My voice cracked and he held me then.
“Maybe I’ll mother towns into being,” I offered.
“Shhhh. You don’t have to try to fix this.”
I remember those days in early 1879 as discomfiting. I was as vulnerable as a Boston lobster during its first year of life when it must shed its hard shell so many times in order to grow larger. Oh, the vulnerability while it grows!