My Brother Louis Measures Worms (3 page)

My mother hardly knew what to think. She had heard of miscalculation, but never of miscalculation by five months.

“But Genevieve,” she said, “isn't this baby coming much too soon?”

“Not for me,” Genevieve said.

Then there was the problem of my father. Having hoped to keep him in the dark about the whole thing or, at the very least, to surprise him with the news sometime next year (“You remember Genevieve Fitch? Well, Genevieve has a lovely baby!”) Mother now had to bring him up to date in a hurry.

“Will you bring the car around front while I call Dr. Hildebrand?” she called downstairs. “We're going to have to take Genevieve to the hospital.”

“What for?” he shouted up. “What's the matter?” And then, still believing Genevieve to be the victim of allergy: “I'll bet it was those oysters we had for supper, wasn't it?”

“You don't understand,” Mother said. “Genevieve isn't sick. She's having a baby . . . this very minute.”

My father, however shaken and mystified by this announcement, apparently recognized the urgency of the situation. For one thing, he could hear Genevieve moaning from upstairs that she dare not try to move. “Never mind the car,” he said to my mother. “I'll call an ambulance. You see what you can do for her. I'd better call Hildebrand too.” A few minutes later he rushed up the stairs. “Is there anyone else I should call?” he asked.

“You might call Frank.”

“I was hoping there would be a husband I could notify.”

“He's in jail,” Mother said. “I couldn't tell you. You would have had a fit. You know you would. Did you reach Dr. Hildebrand?”

“He's on his way. Also the ambulance. Didn't you think I would catch on when this particular moment arrived?”

“Yes,” Mother said, “but this baby is five months early.” She did not add that this was Frank's estimate.

It was hours before the whole thing got straightened out, and in the meantime Juanita the cat escaped from the Slocums' basement and disappeared, and all the neighborhood children (summoned by Maxine ringing the cowbell) ran up and down the street and in and out of everybody's yards looking for her.

Amid all the clamor Genevieve had an eight-and-a-half-pound boy upstairs in the bedroom. She did it all by herself because the ambulance arrived too late and Dr. Hildebrand was busy trying to improvise some kind of incubator for what he believed to be a dangerously premature birth for a seriously allergic mother. But then he got most of his information from my father, who was, in this case, the worse possible source.

Eventually all the loose ends got tied up. Leroy Amos Fraley, Jr., being of great size and marked vigor, was obviously not even five minutes early, and Genevieve's allergy was only a figment of my father's misinformation.

Ethel Fitch, on hearing the good news over the phone, said it was the end of all her hopes and dreams for Genevieve, which had involved a three-month course in beauty culture, to run from mid-June to mid-September (which took care of another loose end) and a subsequent career of styling hair in the front room of the Fitch house. Why else, Ethel wanted to know, did Mother think she had embarked on this painting-and-decorating project? She had done it, she said, all for Genevieve, who had repaid her by taking up with a convict.

My father, trying hard to catch up, said that, crazy or not, Ethel had a point. “After all,” he said, “this Leroy
is
in jail, isn't he?”

“Yes,” Mother said, “but only because Ethel lent him her car and then said he stole it.”

At this point the ambulance, having shut its door and gone away, returned . . . with Juanita and four kittens.

“Didn't like to put 'em out in the street,” the driver said, “and we figured they must have come from somewhere around here.”

“Bring them right in,” my father said. “We seem to be in the business.”

Juanita the cat hung around our house for two or three weeks, much to Maxine Slocum's disgust; Louis and I got to keep one kitten, which we named Leroy in honor of the day's events; and Genevieve and the baby stayed with us for four days until Leroy, who had been released from jail, arrived to take them away.

We all stood around on the front porch watching them go, and my father said now that it was all over he felt like a man who had wandered into someone else's home movie and then wandered out again without ever knowing what it was all about. Louis and I felt much the same way. While watching and waiting for Juanita to have kittens, we had missed the main event; had overlooked the forest for the trees, so to speak, and then missed the trees too.

But, happily for us, there remained one final confusion.

“What do you mean, Leroy is going to have kittens?” my father said the next spring. “How can a male cat have kittens?”

“Well, we were wrong about that,” Mother told him. “And since all the children were so disappointed last year when Juanita ran away, I thought I might call just a very few mothers and see whether their children would like to come—”

“No,” my father said. “No . . . no . . . no.”

Louisa May and the Facts of Life

M
rs. Slocum's plan to
expose us all to the facts of life came a little too late. Everybody in our neighborhood had already been exposed to them, although we didn't know it at the time, and didn't understand that sex had reared its ugly head right across the street in the unlikely person of Louisa May Fuller.

Louisa May and her sister Alma lived on the corner in a little gray cottage, and were described by my cousins from Elyria as “crazy old maids.” But Louis and I had known the Fuller girls all our lives, and didn't think they were very strange. “Not strange at all,” my father often said, “compared to some of your mother's family.”

Alma was the older of the two, and therefore the head of the family, so she made all the big decisions, like how to get ready for Judgment Day. Louisa May decided what to have for dinner and when to paint the house. Louisa May did the washing and the cooking; Alma did the needlepoint and cross-stitched pretty thoughts on all the dish towels. Louisa May scrubbed the kitchen floor and waxed the furniture; Alma picked up the living room and straightened the doilies.

They both were officers of the Women's Missionary Society—Louisa May rolled bandages, made layettes for African babies, collected and mended everybody's used clothing for the mission boxes and kept careful track of the organization's funds; Alma was in charge of devotions every other month, which accounted for most of the pretty thoughts on the dish towels. However, despite this lopsided division of labor (or maybe because of it), they got along very well, agreeing on almost everything except Alma's special concern: a great passion for searching out and recording the genealogy of the Fuller family, which was a matter of very little interest to everyone else, including Louisa May.

After much correspondence, Alma would establish a family tie with somebody in Ponca City, Oklahoma, or East Orange, New Jersey; and she would throw up the window and sing out the news to Louisa May in the garden. “Mr. Fuller, in East Orange, is a third cousin twice removed!” she would call, hoping vainly for some enthusiastic response. But Louisa May just didn't care about all these far-flung connections and considered Alma's fascination with the subject a terrible waste of time, and a little silly into the bargain.

“It's not as if we came from anything grand,” she used to tell my mother, “and even if we did, what would be the good of knowing it?”

Louisa May's hobby was babies. She adored babies. To be sure, nobody in the neighborhood was known to harbor an active dislike of babies, but Louisa May went to the opposite extreme, and seemed to view each individual baby as the beginning and end of all human wonder. Wherever a new baby appeared, there too was Louisa May, hard on the heels of the doctor.

My mother was fond of her, and she worried about her. “Louisa May,” she would say, “you ought to get married. It's just a shame, the way you love babies, that you don't have a family. And you don't want to wait forever. You're thirty-eight years old and it's time you had your own babies. Now, you just find some nice man and marry him.”

“Oh, Mrs. Lawson,” Louisa May said, “I don't want to get married and have to fool with some old man around the house.”

“But he wouldn't be old!” Mother insisted. “You want a respectable young man who's a good provider.”

“Well, I don't want any young man either,” Louisa May always said. “I don't know. . . . Sometimes I ask myself, Would it be worth it to put up with a husband so I could have a baby? But I just can't seem to decide it would. Alma and I have our own ways of doing and things go along pretty smooth, and I wouldn't want to bring a stranger into the house.”

Louisa May's predicament was not openly discussed at home because my mother was particular about discussions of babies and how to get them. But my father was equally particular about having all of us under his nose at the supper table, and at least two or three times a week he missed my little brother Louis.

“I suppose Louisa May Fuller has got him again,” he would grumble. “Why in hell doesn't Louisa May get married and have her own children and quit borrowing Louis?”

Of course this was partly Louis's fault—he loved to have Louisa May borrow him because she let him eat raw cookie dough and ride around on her vacuum cleaner.

“Louisa May doesn't want to get married,” Mother said. “She doesn't want to fool with a man around the house.”

“Well, she could fool with one long enough to get some babies, and leave mine alone.”

I didn't see my mother kick him under the table, but I saw him wince, and the subject was changed to some less interesting topic of the day—less interesting to me, at any rate. Louis wouldn't have cared, because he was only five years old, but I was almost eight and just barely smart enough to know that there were mysteries beyond my ken, and that one such mystery had to do with babies.

I concluded that there must be mysteries beyond my father's ken, too, in view of his remark; for if I didn't know anything else about the subject, I did know that the only way in the world to get a baby was to get married. All the available evidence supported that conclusion. In the first place, that was what I had been told; and in the second place, no unmarried ladies of my acquaintance had babies. Like most little girls, I shared Louisa May's enthusiasm and took it for granted that if there were some other way to get babies, everybody would have a few—my schoolteacher, Miss Lincoln; my aunt Blanche; Miss Styles, who worked at the grocery store; Louisa May, of course . . . maybe even Alma.

I was therefore both amazed and delighted to discover that I was wrong when Louisa May—though still unmarried—got a baby.

Not all at once—she took the usual length of time. But since Louisa May was so large and so comfortably padded, it was five months before her condition began to arouse speculation . . . and another month before Alma noticed anything amiss.

Then Alma brought my mother half of a coconut layer cake. “Too bad to have it go stale,” she said, “and Louisa May and I can't eat it all up—or shouldn't, anyway. I've noticed of late that Louisa May is putting on weight, and I try to help her curb her appetite.”

Louis and I loved the cake and ate most of it feeling sorry for Louisa May who apparently
couldn't
eat it.

“Just because she's fat?” Louis shook his head.

Naturally there was gossip, but it was sketchy and disorganized. There was nothing anyone could put a finger on, so to speak, until one day when Mother quite innocently called across the street, “How are you, Louisa May?”

Louisa May came right over, beaming. “Oh, Mrs. Lawson, I feel wonderful, and I'm just going to tell you why because I know you'll be happy for me. I thought a lot about what you said—about getting married and all, and especially about being thirty-eight and not waiting too long; and, Mrs. Lawson, I just got afraid to wait anymore.”

“Oh, I'm so glad,” Mother said, puzzled but relieved.

“I knew you would be. I don't know what Alma will say. She's not as crazy over babies as I am, and I just know she'll think I should have got married anyway, but”—and Louisa May shrugged—“this opportunity came along and I just thought, Well, why not?”

My mother was speechless. In her moral firmament there existed good women and bad women, and though she had never personally known any bad women, she had a clear image of how they looked and behaved. They would be gaudy, she felt, and rough and coarse, with brassy hair and low-cut dresses. Louisa May, on the other hand, was as plain, and as good, as homemade bread.

Furthermore, Mother had a vague, uneasy notion that she herself had somehow aided and abetted this state of affairs.

Alma turned out to have the same notion. At some point she took a good look at Louisa May and realized that her weight problem was neither permanent nor proper, and she came charging across the street to accuse Mother of encouraging immoral behavior.

“I didn't encourage her,” Mother said. “I never said it was all right. I just wanted her to get married.”

“Oh, how lovely that would be!” said Alma hysterically. “But she didn't, and just see the fix she's in, and she's not even ashamed a little bit. I don't know what in the world to do!”

Mother felt sorry for Alma. “Maybe she could go away somewhere. . . .”

“She won't. She says they might take the baby away from her but that old Dr. Barney will let her keep it, and he will, he will! You know how soft he is, and what will I do?”

This didn't make much sense to Louis and me but we were glad Louisa May didn't have to go anywhere she didn't want to go.

“She won't say who the father is,” Alma went on. “She says it's none of my business. She says—” Here Alma choked. “She says he was a nice man and for me not to worry about it.”

Mother was so flabbergasted by the whole affair that she had no shock left to spare for this, nor even much curiosity, and my father seemed torn between outright astonishment and a kind of grudging approval on the grounds that he would no longer have to hunt around for Louis.

Louisa May did in fact fail to exhibit the least shred of shame or regret and she did not go away somewhere, but she did oblige the neighborhood by staying within doors as much as possible until her baby was born. It was a boy, which was what Louis had said it would be, but he did not claim any special credit for this.

Louisa May bought a very expensive imported perambulator, and what little time she was not feeding the baby, bathing him or rocking him, she wheeled him up and down the street with a rose stuck through the roof of the carriage, humming little tunes and literally commanding people to see how beautiful he was. She called him “darling” and invited other people to call him that too until she hit upon exactly the right name for him.

Nobody needed a second invitation to view the baby, so great was the curiosity as to his parentage. No baby was ever scrutinized more carefully for identifying features, nor with so little satisfaction—for when he got to look like anybody at all, it turned out to be Louisa May: a distinct disappointment to all.

That was later, though. For the time being he looked pretty much like most babies: plump, bald, rosy. He was an unusually happy baby, which prompted someone in the neighborhood to remark, “Love babies always are”—although on the face of it, Louisa May's baby hardly fell into that category. He was so happy, I suppose, because Louisa May didn't allow anything to make him unhappy, and his healthy good humor was almost an affront to decent, respectable women whose babies were fussy or fretful or colicky or pale or cross-eyed.

Won over by the baby and influenced by Louisa May's own attitude (she simply ignored the whole question of the baby's beginnings, as if he had just appeared one day out of thin air), most people quit trying to sort out the moral issues of the case. Reverend Seagraves was asked by one or two of his flock to please call upon Louisa May, and did so, but with no clear purpose in mind and no visible result. Had Louisa May sought counsel, he would have counseled her; had she sought comfort, he would have comforted her; but as it was, all he could do was hold the baby while Louisa May cut him a quarter of a Gravenstein apple pie and read him recent correspondence from the missionary in Bechuanaland.

He ended up by offering to baptize the baby on the first Sunday of the month, although, as he said, he wasn't sure how the congregation would feel.

He need not have worried. Nobody expected or wanted the baby to suffer, and even the most puritanical of the parishioners seemed to take the view that here was a baby who
needed
to be baptized. For most people, though, there was a less lofty consideration. Since the baby didn't
look
like anybody, they pinned their hopes on having him
named
for somebody, and there was every indication that church attendance on that Sunday would set new, towering records.

My mother was shocked by this. “There are people planning to go to church this Sunday,” she said indignantly, “who haven't been inside the church since
they
were baptized!” At first she said she wouldn't go, and then she said my father wouldn't go, and then Louisa May asked both of them to stand up with her and be the baby's godparents, which delighted Louis and me.

My father said at least that way they would be sure of getting a seat, which made Mother so mad that she didn't speak to him for over an hour. It was no joking matter, she said.

It was not, to her. My mother's moral code was simple, uncompromising and, up to now, uncluttered by doubt. She believed that virtue is its own reward and that the evildoer will reap the whirlwind, but Louisa May had scrambled these precepts. Besides, Mother loved Louisa May and didn't want her to reap any whirlwind. Neither, though, could she ignore what was a clear and definite lapse of virtue.

She agreed to be the baby's godmother because she knew Louisa May wouldn't ask anyone else, and she felt it would be compounded cruelty to deny the baby honorary parents when he didn't even have a full complement of real ones.

I was thrilled about the whole thing because I thought it would give me an in with the baby, and he was so generally admired that his good favor amounted to a juvenile status symbol. Neither I nor any of my friends understood exactly how Louisa May came to have him, and though we wondered about it, we didn't wonder nearly as much as our parents thought we did. We just assumed, variously, that he had been brought by a stork, found under a pumpkin or left on Louisa May's doorstep by a band of gypsies, and we really didn't much care.

On the morning of the baptism we were about fifteen minutes ahead of time, but already the church was filling with people. “The baby has a lot of friends,” I whispered to Louisa May, and she smiled.

Father, Louisa May with the baby on her lap, Alma and I all sat together in one pew, saving a place for my mother. She and Louis were coming with our neighbors the Pendletons because there wasn't room in our car, and as the organist started the opening hymn my father began to look around and mutter, “Wonder what's become of her?” I tried to see too, but there were too many people. It was my feeling that Mother was probably stuck back at the door, unable to push her way through, but then I saw Mrs. Pendleton, with her hat on crooked, steaming down the aisle.