Ashes of Fiery Weather (18 page)

“I'm afraid we had to remove your uterus.”

Delia was certain he'd misspoken. He must have put in the word “uterus” instead of something like “socks” or, more likely, “underwear.”
Mrs. O'Reilly, we had to remove your underwear.
A hazard of his profession. He probably thought about the uterus all the time, substituting it for different words. Please pass the uterus. I saw the uterus the other day. I've been standing here waiting for the uterus for ten minutes now. What was the plural? Uteri.

“You had to what?”

“Remove your uterus.”

“You took out my—my—you took it
out?
”

“To save your life,” Dr. Fromson said with sudden spirit. “Unfortunately, you won't have any more children, but you do have your son.”

Delia stared down at her blanketed midsection as though she could see what was missing, the way she would an arm or a leg.

She thought stupidly that none of the stories of the soda bread ever mentioned that if you get your miracle, something will be taken from you in return.

May 1951

Delia stood on the sidewalk outside the convent, Nathaniel beside her. Both of them gazed up at the front door through the black metal gate. Somehow it seemed they were the ones in prison. Sean was asleep. Luke said he was too big for the stroller now and wanted her to get rid of it. Delia had so far refused, exactly for days like this when she brought him from the city to Brooklyn. At three years old, he was too heavy for her to carry for any distance. She pushed the stroller gently back and forth, not too worried. A nap after three would mean trouble at bedtime, but it was only one o'clock.

Even though it was a warm spring afternoon, the convent's windows were closed.

“Do you think they see us?” Nathaniel said.

“I don't think they spend a lot of time looking out the windows.”

“How do you know?”

“You're right, I don't. Maybe she is looking at us right now. She probably thinks you're my husband.”

“And then she's thanking God the baby looks like you.”

“He has my eyes,” Delia said. “She can't see that from there.”

“Your eyes? Your everything,” Nathaniel said, laughing.

“His hair is Luke's,” Delia said, and looked down at Sean, who slept with his fists clenched as though angry at having to be still.

“Well, yes, that's a surprise,” Nathaniel conceded. “When he was really little I would think, Soon he'll be as dark as Delia. But now I'm not so sure. His eyebrows are so light. I think he'll stay blond.” He gazed at the sidewalk.

Delia supposed he was thinking of some trait he expected his brother to have, based on the child he'd been. But maybe Miko had grown taller than he ever imagined. Maybe Miko had gone bald.

Nathaniel looked back up at the convent, scanning the windows.

“A boy doesn't have to look like his father. I'd be better off if I didn't,” he said.

Delia laughed.

“Does it bother his nibs?”

“I don't think Luke cares,” Delia said.
Noticed,
she'd almost said.

“No one in there will think I'm your husband,” Nathaniel said. “Nuns are charitable, but not that charitable. Did you think she would break the rules and come and see him?”

Delia stopped pushing the stroller. Nathaniel thought she passed by here only because she hoped that her mother would spy her grandchild and throw open the door. Yet it was also to view what had almost been the scene of a crime, though in the end, Delia had
not
abandoned her infant here.

In those first, confused weeks after Sean was born, she'd plotted to place him in the turn. Dreamed it in the fever of exhaustion. To give him back. The wrong baby. A changeling. The fairies had not even bothered to get the gender right.

For weeks, Delia did not call the baby by his name because she could not readily remember it. John was Luke's father's name as well, and he refused to pass it on. He said maybe Jack Keegan had been a good man, but John O'Reilly was not. Delia chose Sean, the Irish form of John. She thought Luke didn't like it much better, but he was not cruel enough to argue further over the name of the only child she would ever have.

She'd hated Luke during those first months, the way a ghost might hate the living.

He was solicitous and awkwardly kind, as if she were a lunatic handed over to him for safekeeping.

Though he'd always grumbled about Nathaniel before, Luke was only too glad to let him step in. Delia thought she might have died if not for Nathaniel, who, with Tamar gone, either trusted his new, inept employee to watch the store or closed altogether to come into the city as many as three days a week. He brought food and common sense.

Delia tried to explain that her organs were falling into the hole in her middle. First one kidney, then the other; left lung, right lung. Her liver. Somehow she was still living, but one night her heart would tip into the abyss and she would not wake up when the baby began to scream.

Nathaniel explained that this was not happening. She would accept, in time. When she told him the doctor suggested shock treatment, saying it helped when new mothers had these kinds of symptoms, Nathaniel made her switch doctors. Delia might have let them try it. Out of curiosity. To see what happened. The new doctor said that she was a lucky girl to have one baby when some women had none.

When Sean was about three months old, he began to sleep for longer stretches. Waking up became closer to what waking up used to be. One morning, Delia opened her eyes to see daylight around the edges of the curtain. Babies died in their sleep sometimes. She got out of bed slowly and with her eyes closed made her way to his room across the hall. All the nights he'd woken her she'd done this, led to him by the sound of his crying. Now there was only silence, but she knew well the path between bed and crib. With her eyes still closed, she laid a hand on his chest. Up and down, so gently she could barely feel it.

A fierceness that seemed to be an equal blend of love and terror replaced her indifference. When Sean began to eat solid food, she had to sit on her hands to keep herself from panicking and pulling the food out of his mouth, an act that might well
make
him choke. When he climbed stairs, she stayed right behind him, her arms out, in case he fell backwards. Every kid in the playground was his potential murderer: polio. The fear was punishment, she realized, for being coy with the universe. She'd asked for help from a God she'd barely believed in.

These days, she was trying hard not to hover, to breathe through the acute panic she felt when she lost sight of him for half a second.

“We're growing roots here, heart,” Nathaniel said.

“You're right. Enough of this. Where to?”

“Do you walk around the neighborhood until he wakes up, and bring him by the firehouse?”

“No,” Delia said.

Nathaniel's eyebrows went up slightly.

“He's old enough now to remember the fuss they'll make over him. Every time we pass by a firehouse he's going to want to go in and jump on the truck.”

“Other firemen won't let him?”

“No, they all will. That's the problem.”

Nathaniel only clapped his hands together. “To the garden, then.”

At Brooklyn Botanic Garden, they settled on a bench beside the Cherry Esplanade, a spot they chose for the wide lane of lawn bordered by cherry trees, the open space ideal for a three-year-old boy who has just woken up. She tried to smooth his sleep-ruffled hair but Sean jerked away and took off running. She jumped up and called to him.

“Sean! Sean! Don't go too far!”

“Where's he going to go?” Nathaniel asked.

“True.” Delia sat down.

Sean picked up a stick and began dragging it through the flower petals that covered the grass. Blossoms drifted steadily from the trees like pink snow. It was the first Saturday in May, so the trees were about a week past peak bloom, Nathaniel told her. Every weekend in April, no matter the weather, Nathaniel came to see the cherry trees. Delia knew he also came to scan the crowds who came to see the cherry trees.

He still read the ever-updated Red Cross lists and several Polish newspapers, all the articles, skimming for the name or any stray mention of a young man the age his brother would be. He wrote letters to the American and Polish embassies. He left notes in Polish books in the library at Grand Army Plaza and the big library on Fifth Avenue in the city.

Mikolaj Kwiatkowski, I am here in Brooklyn. Your brother, Nathaniel Kwiatkowski.
He left the address and phone number of the store.

Nathaniel had come to believe that his little brother, now a man, would someday find his way to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Or the Brooklyn Bridge. Or Prospect Park. Or Central Park. Or the Empire State Building. And he, Nathaniel, would be there when he did. His vigils had no set schedule. When he woke with a feeling. When he had the time.

Delia might have pointed out that maybe Miko had loved beauty before the war but was unable to see it now. He might not be in America. If in America, he might not be in New York. If in New York, he might not be in Brooklyn. But though Nathaniel no longer wore a yarmulke, no longer kept strictly kosher or went to synagogue, he believed he would see his brother again.

Sean scooped up a handful of petals and tried to release them. But they were damp, and Nathaniel laughed at his consternation as he shook his hand wildly to try to get them off. He ran over to Delia and she brushed his palm clean. He ran back to his stick.

“They say the nuns from the cloister come here on days the garden is closed.”

Delia laughed. “All of those tales about them escaping. They go to the Green-Wood. They go to the little cemetery, the one where my dad is buried. They go to the movies. But they don't, Nathaniel. They never come out.”

“I suppose,” he said.

They both watched Sean for a moment, and then Nathaniel asked,

“How is his nibs doing at work? Still writing his scintillating stories about the Society of Saint Patrick?”

“The alliteration is a nice touch,” Delia said. “His uncle asked again about Luke going over to the business side of the paper, and he said not yet.”

Asked again, though Luke's uncle by now certainly realized his nephew had little interest in running a newspaper. During the family dinners Delia was forced to endure every few months, Mick got fairly drunk and told Luke his problem was that he married too young. Got your fire put out early, he said.

“He says he's looking for a new job,” Delia said. Without the rental income from her house, they wouldn't be able to pay the bills.

“This is the longest job hunt in history,” Nathaniel said.

“Seems so,” Delia conceded. “His heart's not in writing anything but letters to England.”

“England?” Nathaniel said. “An old friend from Ireland?”

“She's not Irish. At least going by her name, she's not. Charlotte Edgewood. We got a Christmas card last year from her. Luke must have written her back, because every couple of weeks he gets a letter from her. I get the mail, so he knows I see them. He doesn't even bother to have her send them to the office.”

Sean ran back and forth, dragging the stick behind him. Delia wanted to get up and snatch it out of his hand. If he fell with it, it could stab him, couldn't it? Through the stomach. Through the eye. She tucked her hands beneath her thighs.

“You don't open these letters?”

Delia glanced at him, and then away from his steady gaze. “God, no. I wouldn't do that.”

“Because you don't care enough,” Nathaniel said.

“Because tampering with someone's mail is a federal offense.”

Nathaniel laughed, and she grinned at him.

“How about while you're here, you go by your house and give your tenants notice? Their leases are up in June, July? Give them until the end of the summer. That's more than enough time.”

“More than enough time to toss two families out onto the street.”

“When you rent, you go when your landlady says go. The city is no place to raise a boy. The crowds. The noise. The dirt. Brooklyn has all three, but then we have
this.
” He waved a hand expansively.

“There's the garden up in the Bronx.”

“When do you go up to the Bronx?” He laughed. “Do you ever even make it to Central Park?”

“Hardly ever.” Delia hated Manhattan. Or rather, hated living there for all the reasons Nathaniel named. She still felt like a tourist there.

“Get a
get?
” she said.

He'd told her the name for a divorce under Jewish law.

“Get a
get,
” he answered.

Delia sighed. She wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and close her eyes for a moment, but she wouldn't do that to him.

Sean was now at the end of the lawn, near the path, rolling down the slight hill and then running back up and doing it again.

“He's going to be filthy. I brought extra pants but no extra shirt. Remember when he was really little and I brought four outfits whenever I left the apartment?”

“You're not even being subtle, the way you're changing the subject. But I'll go along. It's warm out. He won't catch pneumonia. He's a boy. He doesn't care if he's dirty.” Nathaniel smiled indulgently. “I can't believe how tall he's getting.”

“All the old ladies on the subway think he's four already. Then they ask me when the next one's coming. What am I waiting for?” Delia said. “I should eat the goddamn soda bread now. Now
that
would be a miracle.”

“You have him,” Nathaniel said.

“I wanted a big family,” she said.

“Please,” Nathaniel said. “Maybe you wanted to be a
part
of a big family. You don't want to be the mother of it. Too much time away from your books. You like quiet. I'm glad you have this one, though. That's a good thing.”