In the Family Way
Prescott Mills, Maine
September 1931
“Idella?”
It was impossible to hear clearly over the phone. Idella put a hand over her other ear. “Ethel? Ethel, is that you?” She hated to talk too loud with the phone here in the hall, on the bottom floor of the apartment house on Haskell Street. She’d been washing her hair in the sink when she heard the three-long, two-short ring that was theirs. The towel she’d wrapped around her head kept untwisting, and she needed both hands to get it back together. “Ethel?” She was sure she’d heard Eddie’s sister saying her name and then nothing, no sound. “This is Idella. Is that you?”
“It is. It’s me.”
She sounded terrible. “Is everything okay? You sick?” More silence. “Is Mr. Jensen okay? Ethel, what is it?”
“Idella, I’m . . . I’m . . . Oh, God help me, I’m going to have a baby!”
“A baby!” It came out of Idella like a gust of wind. Her towel fell to the floor behind her, and her wet hair flopped into her face. “You’re sure about this?”
“I am. I been to Doc Russo. It’s four months now.”
“You been to the doctor?” Idella wasn’t absorbing the information as quickly as she got it. She could feel herself a beat behind. Four months! She reached up and squeezed the back of her wet hair. Dribbles of still-soapy water went down her back and got her dress wet. What in Holy God’s name was Jessie going to do? Who would tell Edward?
“I’m afraid, Idella. I’m afraid to tell.”
Idella hesitated. She had to watch what she was saying out here in the hall. Old Mr. Bentley was just coming in with his daily quart of milk. He nodded to her as he shuffled by and opened the door to his apartment. He wouldn’t care. But if Mrs. Rice up on the second floor got wind of this, Ethel wouldn’t have to worry about who would be doing the telling.
Idella lowered her voice. “Is it? . . . Was it? You know . . . that did it, that was the source?”
“Yes. O’ course. He’s the only one I been out with, Idella. He said . . .” Ethel was crying. Idella could tell by the jerky gaps in her words. “He promised he loved me . . . and he said . . .” Oh, she was really going to pieces. “He said he’d been fixed. . . .”
“Fixed?” Idella didn’t think she’d heard that right.
“Fixed. You know. Not like he was broke, but I thought it didn’t work. He told me that. Oh, God, Idella, what am I going to do? You’re the only one I dare tell. I had to tell. I’m showing!” Ethel’s sobs were coming right through the wire.
It worked all right, Idella thought. That bastard. A soldier stationed down in New Hampshire. He’d seemed nice enough. He’d seemed too nice. Oily. Over Ethel. She was not the type to attract . . . well . . . attractive men. She was proud to be dating someone in a uniform who made her feel special. God knows she’d had so much trouble in her life that everybody just sort of went along with it, hoping she wouldn’t get too broken up when he left. No one thought he’d leave her with something.
“I’ve got to talk to Eddie. He needs to help find him. He’s the only one with a car.” Ethel was crying so, it was hard to make out the words. “I’m afraid to tell Eddie. I can’t tell Mother!”
“Someone’s waiting on the phone here, Ethel. You wait there. I’ll tell Eddie when he gets home. He has to be told. You go back home and wait. Rest, why don’t you?” Foley’s Market. That’s over a mile she’d walked to make the call. People must be taking notice of her closed up in the booth crying. If she didn’t get herself home, Jessie would find out by sundown.
“Get on home now, Ethel. Go on. I’m hanging up. Mrs. Tilden needs the phone.” This wasn’t true, but she had to get off. Mrs. Tilden was probably glued up against the other side of her apartment door taking notes. Idella’d heard the radio go off in there all of a sudden. And she smelled cigarette smoke.
She went back to the apartment and locked the door, which they normally only did before bed. She had a need to feel safe. She didn’t even wash the shampoo out. She sat down at the kitchen table, with the wet towel on her lap, in her slippers, and started worrying.
Poor Ethel. Idella had felt sorry for her upon sight. She was a simple woman. Not stupid, exactly, but simple, plain in every way, and sort of wooden. Even her face didn’t move much when she talked. It was a blank expanse, like a sheet of paper with a mouth and some eyes drawn onto it. And her pleasures were simple—always making afghan squares and crocheting doilies. Ethel had a toaster cover she’d made out of purple yarn that Idella thought could not be safe. But Ethel was so proud of it that she never said anything. There was a doll with a big crocheted skirt over the roll of toilet paper. That drove Eddie to distraction. He’d nearly beheaded it one time.
Her going to all that trouble to make covers for things that didn’t need covering pointed out the way that Ethel’s intentions were good but the thought process behind them was apt to have holes in it.
And bad things did happen to that woman. It was not Ethel’s fault that her own father-in-law was a foreman down at the paper mill those ten years ago and that he sent his son out working in a big storm on Thanksgiving. Maybe it was because it was his son and he didn’t want to appear to play favorites. Whatever the reason, that man sent his own son, Ethel’s husband, out across the catwalk, and he slipped on the ice and fell into the machine, and that was that.
For years Ethel had to be helped through Thanksgiving. Even after Idella’d come on the scene, it was a solemn occasion.
And that father-in-law cut Ethel out! He did not help support her or offer help for those kids. And the mill itself gave her a measly six hundred dollars in payment. And for the longest time, they would not hire her. What matter if she wasn’t going to be their best worker? They owed her at least that much, those damn men over there. They ruled lives in this town. Every week, for years, Ethel would walk down to the mill and ask about getting hired. The paper mill hired hundreds of workers. But they wouldn’t take on Ethel until four or five years passed. It was a crime, Idella thought, an actual crime. Now, at least, Ethel was one of the clerks. She could do that, and she should have been doing it a lot sooner.
Idella sighed. Entering into a family could be such a muddle. She sat there for over an hour, till a jingle for Camel cigarettes, Eddie’s brand, came on the radio and roused her. She looked at the clock and saw that it was five. He would be home inside of twenty minutes.
She quick rinsed out her hair and changed from her wet dress. There was no supper ready. She looked in the fridge and saw the eggs. She would have to do some fancy footwork, cook up some eggs, put them in front of him on a plate, and call it supper.
She was slicing bread for toast, lost in ways to tell Eddie, when she heard him pounding on the front door. She’d left it locked.
“Idella! What the hell is going on? You in there?”
“I’m coming.” She ran to the door and unlocked it.
“Why’ve you got the goddamn door locked?” He stopped and looked at her. “Why is your hair wet?” He put his brimmed hat and car keys on the coffee table and looked around the room. “Is something going on here?”
“No. No. Nothing.” Idella went into the kitchen without looking at his face directly.
“You want a beer, Eddie?”
“Beer’d be good.” She got one out of the fridge and brought it to him. “You sit on the couch while I finish with supper. Put your feet up. Hard day?”
“Christ, yes. I’m so sick of watching tin cans come down the line. I’m getting out soon. Them guys think they know everything, and they don’t know nothing. Franklin telling Cobb there next to me to move things along. Asshole. Cobb’s doing his job. That Franklin never says anything to me, by God.” Eddie sat drinking his beer. He looked around. “Why was the door locked?”
“No reason. Habit.”
“You didn’t want someone coming in and robbing you while you was bent over the sink washing your hair?” Eddie laughed. “Is that it?”
He came into the kitchen, stood behind her, and kissed her neck. “I’ll bother you. Would that be all right?”
“It’s not too good an idea just now.” She stopped whisking the fork through the eggs and moved over to light the stove.
“What’s for supper?” Eddie looked into the bowl. “What’s this? Eggs?”
“Yes.” Idella tapped a pat of butter into the frying pan.
“Eggs for supper?”
“Why not?” She kept her eyes on the butter pooling and bubbling about the pan.
“Eggs is breakfast. What’s going on here, Idella? You got someone holed up in the closet?”
Idella took a deep breath and turned to face him. “Your sister called me today.”
“I’ll kill the bastard! I’ll murder him!” Edward had been mouthing threats since they’d roared out of their driveway on Haskell Street. He gripped the steering wheel so hard that Idella feared it might come off in his hands when he made the sharp turn on Elm Street. He pulled in to the drive of Ethel’s small clapboard house and was out of the car, at the front door, before Idella had her feet out.
“Ethel! Let me in! Where is he run off to?” Eddie was pounding on the door and ringing the bell at the same time. “I’ll make that goddamned bastard pay for what he done!”
Ethel opened the door slowly. As soon as she saw her brother standing there, she burst into tears.
“Where is he? Where is the bastard?” Eddie charged into the house as if Ethel’s boyfriend was hiding in a closet or behind the couch. Idella hurried up the wooden steps and closed the door behind her. She locked it. The whole neighborhood would be listening.
“He’s run off, Eddie.” Idella saw that Ethel’s face was wet from crying. “He’s disappeared.”
“How can a soldier disappear?”
“I went there. I went down to New Hampshire to the base. So help me, Eddie. I took the bus. I tried to talk to the officers, but they wouldn’t let me through.” Ethel was sobbing. “They won’t tell me where he’s been moved to. He’s gone somewhere else, and they won’t tell me.”
“Oh, my God.” Idella went up to Ethel and led her over to the couch to sit. “You have been doing this all alone. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“I’m so scared. I’m ashamed. He said he loved me. I thought he’d marry me.”
“There, there.” Idella put her arm around Ethel’s slumped body and tried to calm her. It did look like she had a little belly starting up there. Her dress was pulling some across her middle.
“He loved you, all right, that bastard! On Saturday night with a drink in him. Come Sunday he was sober. He was thinking of other things.”
“Edward! Don’t talk to her like that!”
“You’re in a fix now, by God. We all are! Goddamned son of a bitch. And you, acting like a whore! Bringing some soldier home like a goddamned whore! With your own kids upstairs sleeping!”
“Edward, stop this right now!”
“We can’t tell Ma,” Eddie said, ignoring Idella.
“I know it. I know we can’t. She’ll disown me.”
“Oh, now, Ethel.” Idella squeezed her limp hand. It was wet as a fish. “She is your mother. She loves you. She’ll help as best she can.”
“No. She won’t help.” Ethel was sobbing full out. “She’ll hate me.”
“She won’t help, Idella.” Eddie, who had been roaming the room like a penned bull, stopped and looked at her. “Ma can’t know.”
“This is the goddamnedest group of people I have ever married into. Are you saying she will cut out her own daughter and grandchild?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Idella!” Eddie roared. “And she’ll make Dad do it, too. All of us!”
“I can’t believe this.”
“She will,” Ethel sobbed. “She won’t.”
“That’s what we’re saying!”
That night Idella lay wide awake next to Eddie. She knew that he was awake, too. They’d been lying side by side, not touching any part of each other while the clock ticked endlessly next to Eddie’s pillow. Every turn or audible breath was self-conscious. Idella was not going to be the one to speak first. She was too upset.
“I don’t mean to do it,” Eddie mumbled into the dark.
“Do what?”
“Get so mad. It comes over me. I can’t stop it.”
“I know it. I guess I know it. But it doesn’t help things much.”
“No, it don’t. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Ethel’s in the middle of it.”
“It was a goddamned fool thing to do!”
“Oh, go on. It’s human. That woman has been left alone with those three boys since the day I met her. It’s over ten years since the accident. My God. All alone with those kids. I know what that’s like. She’s homely as a post, but she’s got feelings. And along comes someone who pays her some attention, after all these years of nothing. You’d do the same damn thing if you were in her shoes. I would.”
“You would?”
“Yes, I would, by God. I think.” Idella rolled away from him. “It is certainly possible that I might.” She sighed. “Christ, I don’t know what I’d do.”
There was a long silence between them. Idella rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling. The light fixture was crooked, and she didn’t suppose anyone would ever get around to straightening it out. It’d fall down on top of them first.
“She that ugly?”
“She’s not pretty, let’s put it that way.”
“I look like her?”
“Just the legs.”
“Let’s see your legs.”
“No.” Idella smiled at the ceiling.
“Let me feel them, then.” Eddie reached a hand over toward her.
Idella scrunched her legs up into a ball and turned away from him. “No.”
He put his hand on her knee. “You’d date a soldier? If I was to run off?”
Idella smiled. “I wouldn’t wait any ten years either.”
“Is that so?”
He turned her toward him. She let her legs stretch out long. She was soft and pliable now. He took her into his arms.
“What are we going to do?” Idella whispered.