My Brother Louis Measures Worms (2 page)

So, in the end, nothing much happened to us.

Mother, however, continued to fret. She seemed to think that Louis would now be driven to drive, as people are driven to drink, and saw the car as a dangerous temptation . . . or so she said.

I suppose my father saw no reason to maintain a car no one wanted to drive—except Louis, sitting on telephone books.

“Well, you'll be out one Christmas present,” he told Mother. “So you have one coming. Make it a good one.”

“Oh”—she eyed the sofa, which was old and rump-sprung and didn't match the living room—“I'll think of something.”

The Mysterious Visit of Genevieve Fitch

M
axine Slocum lived
two houses down from us, and when Maxine's cat got pregnant, Mrs. Slocum called up all the mothers in the neighborhood to say that all children would be welcome at the lying-in unless their mothers objected. It was the beginning of an enlightened era and no mother wanted to seem unenlightened, so everybody accepted Mrs. Slocum's invitation.

My father said it was the craziest idea he had ever heard in his life. “There must be thirty-five kids in this neighborhood,” he said. “What are they going to do, put up bleachers?”

“They have that big basement,” Mother said.

“Suppose the cat decides to have her kittens in the hall closet, or under the bed? Poor damn cat. . . .” He looked at me and my little brother, Louis. “Take my advice, don't go. Be kind to a cat. How would you like to have a baby in front of thirty-five people?”

“French queens used to have to,” Louis said, “to prove the succession.”

When Louis said things like that, people always raised their eyebrows and whispered to Mother that he must be a genius. He wasn't, though; he was just one of those people who remembered odd, unrelated facts. Ask him to tell you what “the succession” meant, and he would have been up a tree.

I was only worried that the cat would have her kittens in the middle of the night or something, but Maxine promised that if that happened she would run out in the street and ring her father's antique cowbell.

“Don't worry, Mary Elizabeth,” she told me. “You'll hear that.”

In the meantime, we all kept the cat, whose name was Juanita, under close surveillance and privately hoped to get a kitten out of the whole thing.

According to my father, that was really Mrs. Slocum's dark purpose. “It isn't that she wants to provide this rich educational experience for everybody under sixteen,” he said. “She just wants to get rid of the kittens.”

In any case, the approaching accouchement of the cat had us all in a state of fevered anticipation; and so when Genevieve Fitch took up her sudden and mysterious residence at our house, I was too preoccupied to wonder why.

This suited my Mother right down to the ground. The less said about Genevieve Fitch the better, in her opinion; but she had to make some kind of explanation because nobody else in the family was quite sure who Genevieve Fitch was.

Genevieve wasn't exactly a perfect stranger, but her relationship was so remote—third or fourth cousin, two or three times removed—that I had never before laid eyes on her, nor had Louis, nor had my father. But Mother was one of a large family with whom she tried to keep in some kind of touch, and my father didn't begin to know who all of them were. When strange relatives showed up from time to time he always made them welcome, but he didn't always remember, later on, just who they were.

Of course, when Genevieve showed up, he didn't know the nature of her predicament (or even that she was
in
a predicament), because Mother didn't tell him the whole story. She simply said that Genevieve would be staying with us for a few days while the inside of her house got painted.

Though this seemed odd—every three or four years the inside of our house got painted and nobody moved out—it was the kind of oddity that children can understand and accept. I had one particular dress that I would never wear on Wednesdays. Louis would eat no sandwich that was not cut on the diagonal. Genevieve Fitch would not stay in a house that was being painted. Who knew why?

After a day or two of Genevieve, my father decided that he would like to know why. Had she been a sprightlier person he might have been more willing to take Mother's vague explanation at face value . . . but Genevieve was a pale, somewhat doughy young woman with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and I suppose he was honestly bewildered that my mother, who had lots of snap and hustle, would be willing to put up with so flat a presence for so silly a reason.

“Does Genevieve always move out when her house is being painted?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Mother said.

“Probably everything is being painted this time—walls, woodwork, ceiling—just one big mess all over the place. Easier to move out and let them get it done. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Mother said, much relieved. “That's it.”

But of course that wasn't it, and as new, puzzling scraps of information came to light, the plot thickened. We learned, for instance, that it wasn't Genevieve's house at all, but her mother's house; and that her mother, Ethel Fitch, was still in it despite the big mess all over the place.

We also learned that my mother and Genevieve had not seen each other for almost six years; and that, in fact, for the first few days of her visit, Genevieve had mistakenly believed herself to be visiting Cousin Olive Underwood and
her
family.

My father immediately saw the possibilities in this. “Well, it's all a big mistake,” he said. “She isn't even supposed to be here. And this Olive Underwood cousin is watching and waiting for her . . . probably worried to death. We'd better get her packed up and take her there right away.”

“No, no,” Mother said. “Certainly not. Genevieve just got mixed up. And you can't blame her. Look at you, you can't keep all my relatives straight, either.”

“Maybe not, but if I planned to move in with one of them, I would at least pick one I knew by sight.”

Shortly thereafter he happened to run into one of the few he
did
know by sight, Mother's brother Frank, and Frank knew all about Genevieve.

“Good thing she could stay with you,” Frank said. “Had to get the poor girl away from the smell of that paint, you know. Believe me, I gave her mother a piece of my mind. Not that it does much good. Ethel never did have any sense . . . crazy woman.”

From this conversation my father deduced that Genevieve was seriously allergic to paint (the one interesting thing he had yet learned about her); and that her mother, Crazy Ethel, either didn't know or didn't care about her daughter's allergy. While he didn't like the sound of it, at least it was some kind of explanation.

In later years, when recalling the whole affair, Mother always insisted that she did not intend a deliberate deception; that she simply wished to spare my father the burden of Genevieve's problem. And she always pointed out that if he had ever asked her, flat out, “Is Genevieve pregnant?” she would have said, “Yes.” But he never asked.

“Why in hell would I ask?” he always said. “Why would such an idea occur to me?”

Why, indeed? Genevieve, being shapeless and lumpy all over, didn't
look
pregnant, and nothing she ever said while living with us would lead to that conclusion. As for putting paint and pregnancy together, like two and two, my father would have come up with five every time, and when this danger was eventually explained to him—“The smell of paint can make a woman miscarry”—he said that sounded like something Louis would tell us without knowing what he was talking about.

Nevertheless, Genevieve was pregnant, and respectably so, though temporarily abandoned by her husband, one Leroy Fraley. This was Mother's initial understanding of the situation and though, like my father, she didn't like the sound of it, she did feel sorry for Genevieve. She felt the press of family obligation, however far removed, and she agreed with Frank that Ethel Fitch didn't have good sense. (In fact, this was a substantial understatement. Ethel was definitely closet kin: not quite loony enough to be committed, not quite sane enough to run loose.) Most of all, Mother believed that Genevieve's stay would be brief, her departure orderly, and that, in the meantime, efforts would be made to locate the footloose Leroy Fraley.

All of this added up to “Genevieve's problem,” from the burden of which my father was to be spared, much as he was spared all sorts of minor domestic dilemmas. Mother never called on him to manage things that she could manage herself or to sort out awkward situations that, left alone, would sort themselves out. Besides, she knew that he would find the tangle of Genevieve's affairs preposterous, and she was afraid that he would object to having the whole thing dropped in his lap . . . or, to be precise, in his spare bedroom. He recognized that there were unfortunate people all over the place who couldn't seem to regulate their lives, but he didn't expect to find any such people under his own roof.

Of course, he didn't count sickness as mismanagement. It wasn't Genevieve's fault she was allergic to paint, he felt, and in the absence of anything else to talk to Genevieve about, he talked to her about her “condition.”

“I know you get a very serious reaction to this,” he said, “but just how does it affect you? Do you break out in a rash? There's a young woman in my office who has your same trouble, and her face swells up. She can't see, can hardly eat . . . It's a terrible thing. Has that ever happened to you?”

“No. . . .” Genevieve said, looking pretty worried. “But my feet swell up if I'm not careful.”

My father said that was most unusual, he had never heard of that. “I understand the worst of all is the respiratory effect. These people who suddenly can't breathe . . . their throats just close up—” and then, as Genevieve looked
really
worried, he went on, “I'll tell you what you ought to do—you ought to get a shot. You know, they have shots now for people like you. But you don't want to wait till you're in trouble. You want to get the shot well ahead of time. Then, too,” he added, “they can make tests and find out just what causes this condition.”

“Oh, I know what causes it,” Genevieve said.

“Not necessarily. It could be any number of things. It could even be something you eat.”

From this, and similar cockeyed conversations, Genevieve apparently concluded that my father was just as crazy as her mother, so it's no wonder that she grew restive for Leroy Fraley to come and take her away.

She mentioned this once or twice to Mother—“I surely do hope that Leroy can come pretty soon”—but Mother never knew what to say in reply, it seemed like such a pitiable state of affairs. It never occurred to her that Genevieve might know where Leroy Fraley was, until, in desperation, Genevieve decided to join him.

She had overheard the tail end of a conversation between Louis and my father, in which Louis asked how many kittens Juanita the cat might have. My father said that under the circumstances—the great publicity, the Slocums' damp basement and a cast of thousands—it would be a miracle if she had even one, and a greater miracle if that one didn't have to be taken away from its mother and drowned.

“Why would it be drowned?” Louis said.

“Well, maybe not drowned, but put out of its misery. Sometimes it's kinder. If it isn't healthy and vigorous, it won't survive anyway, and it's just better to do away with it.”

It was this last speech that Genevieve overheard, and so harsh a view, coupled with my father's seeming belief that pregnancy was caused by any number of things, including diet, and that it could be prevented by inoculation, apparently convinced her that she had gone from a frying pan into a fire and had better get away while she could.

“But, Genevieve, where will you go?” Mother said.

“I'm going to Leroy. He can't come here, so I'll go to him.”

“What do you mean, he can't come here?” Mother wanted to know. “And how can you go to him, if you don't know where he is?”

“I know where he is,” Genevieve said. “He's in Latticeburg, Kentucky. He's in jail.”

Mother certainly hadn't counted on this, but it did fit in with her notion of a man who would desert his pregnant wife. She called Frank with the news, and Frank said he would find out about it right away. He also said that Genevieve must stay right where she was; the smell of paint in Ethel Fitch's house was still too strong for safety.

This was very discouraging information for my mother, who by this time felt herself hopelessly caught in an intrigue for which she had no taste in the first place, and little aptitude. But there wasn't anything she could do about it except wait—for the paint to settle or for Leroy Fraley to be sprung, whichever came first.

The next day Frank called, sputtering over the telephone, to say that he had found Leroy and that Leroy was in jail for stealing a car—specifically, the car of Ethel Fitch.

“He says he borrowed it,” Frank said. “She says he stole it. I believe him, because he doesn't sound smart enough to steal a car, and we all know Ethel's crazy. Either she lent it to him and forgot she did, or she lent it to him and had him arrested anyway. I don't know why she would do that, and I don't much care. I'm going to get him out of jail if I can and get him back here. He
wants
to come back. He loves Genevieve.”

Mother, reeling from this series of fresh alarms, seized on the one bright spot. “It's wonderful that he feels that way,” she said. “I'm sure everything will work out, and he can be with Genevieve when the baby comes.”

In view of the imperfect communication on all sides, it's not surprising that nobody knew exactly
when
the baby was supposed to come. My mother assumed that it was due in four or five months because that was what Frank assumed—on the testimony of Ethel Fitch, who had told him something about Genevieve being “all set by the middle of September.” Genevieve must have known when the baby was due; but since she had never even mentioned a baby to Mother, Mother assumed that she was unhappy about it or ashamed about it, and she didn't want to hound Genevieve with painful questions.

Consequently, when Genevieve went into labor, nobody knew what was going on, including Genevieve, who was expecting a monumental stomachache and did not associate low back pain with the onset of birth. She suffered in silence all day, and by the time she finally decided that this must be something more than muscle strain, things were very far along.