The Midwife of Hope River (10 page)

15

The Midwife

“What's wrong, honey? You in some kind of trouble?” whispers Colleen, the yellow-haired waitress at the café across from the train station in Pittsburgh. I know her name from the stitching on her white uniform dress.

Tired and scared, I took the first train out of Chicago, not caring where it went, sure that the coppers were after me. Up until that day, I'd never been more than fifty miles from Deerfield.

Next thing I know, I'm getting out of a cab in front of Mrs. Kelly's house in Homestead. Colleen told me there was a midwife, a lady who delivered babies all over town, who might know of a job for a wet nurse. My milk is already leaking, and I tried to express it twice in the lavatory.

 

Embarrassed by my wrinkled attire and my sad, limp hair, I knock on her door.

“Yes?” It's a tall, dark-haired woman with an aquiline nose, dressed in a flapper outfit and smoking a cigarette; not what I'd expected.

“I'm Lizbeth Snyder , a wet nurse from Kansas City, looking for work.” (Afraid of the coppers, I'd come up with the idea of Kansas just five minutes before.) “Colleen, the waitress at the café near Union Station, told me a midwife, Mrs. Kelly, lives here and could maybe help me find work.”

“Sophie! Get down here. There's a girl with breast milk all over her front!”

The flapper turned out to be Nora. She talked like that, kind of brassy, but she'd grown up in Shadyside, in a Victorian mansion, and could speak properly when she wanted to.

Mrs. Kelly trotted down the stairs, a big woman with graying black hair pinned up in a bun. None of the trendy flapper girl clothes for her. She wasn't fat and she wasn't skinny, just a tree you could lean on.

“Well, dear me! Come in.”

Sitting in Sophie Kelly and Nora Waters's apartment over the bread shop, having tea, I was at once comforted. Nora brought me one of her clean white long-sleeved work blouses, and Sophie lent me her brush. I couldn't tell them why I'd landed in Pittsburgh, and they had sense enough not to ask.

The midwife insisted that we go right away to see a lady who had just delivered twins and might need a girl like me. She lived a few miles away with her husband and two other children in one of those big homes near Friendship. Sophie was like that; if there was a problem, she went straight at it like a bull toward a red wool shirt.

 

As luck would have it, there was no work for a milkmaid with the family in Friendship or anywhere else, but Mrs. Kelly, a hospital-trained nurse turned midwife, admired my grit, or maybe just took pity on me, and offered me their back bedroom upstairs. There was only a cot, a chifforobe, and a small table, nothing much, but with the two women, I felt really safe for the first time in days.

This was 1913, just about Christmas. Mrs. Kelly bound my breasts with comfrey leaves until my milk dried up, and Nora found me a job on the line where she worked at Westinghouse. The United States was gearing up for the Great War, over many objections, and Pittsburgh was booming. I didn't care if the factory made munitions or who got killed with them. I had friends and a home. I was happy.

 

Nora and Sophie

It was months before I figured out that Sophie and Nora were lovers. I caught them kissing in the kitchen, and I don't mean a smooch on the cheek either. Nora's blue eyes shimmered, and she had her hand down Mrs. Kelly's blouse. Not that I minded; I'd known other lesbians when I worked at the Majestic.

When you've been a milkmaid for other people's babies; lived in other people's homes; lied about your age; stolen jewelry; run away with nothing but your cloak, your favorite painting, and your mother's old Bible and hymnal, you accept that people survive and find happiness however they can.

 

At first, I always called Mrs. Kelly “Mrs. Kelly” instead of “Sophie” because she was old enough to be my mother, though forty-four doesn't seem old now. I called Nora “Nora” because she was thirty-four, more like a girl, though now that I'm thirty-six, I don't feel at all girlish.

In the fall, the three of us moved to a little row house near Kenny's Park, the one they later turned into Kennywood, the place with merry-go-round rides and an arcade. The two-story white clapboard had a huge living room with a bay window. There was a larger kitchen and a trolley stop one block away. We took the streetcar to work or into the city when we wanted to go to a rally, a free concert, or a baseball game at Forbes Field. It cost only a nickel either way and with Nora and I each making seven dollars a week, we could afford the extravagance.

After work and on weekends, Nora distributed birth control information on the downtown Pittsburgh streets, and sometimes I went with her. At night Nora and I would go to the Crawford Grill in the Hill District, where we heard Duke Ellington and some of the local jazz musicians, like Erroll Garner and Billy Strayhorn. And then there were the gardens and the zoo at Highland Park. Mrs. Kelly liked that.

 

Those were the days when on Friday nights we'd have friends, both men and women, over for Irish stew and homemade bread. We'd read out loud the poems of Walt Whitman, passages by Tolstoy and polemics from the International Workers Association. Once Emma Goldman stopped by and several times Mother Jones, the union organizer, did too.

Mother's given name was Mary Harris Jones, and she'd been a dressmaker before her four children died of yellow fever and she joined with the United Mine Workers. Most people don't know that. She carried her sadness like I carry mine, under her heart. If you'd asked how she dealt with it, for a moment she wouldn't have known what you meant. Then she might pull the dried knot of pain out and stare at it like a foreign thing until she remembered . . .

Mother Jones brought John L. Lewis with her. This was before he was president of the UMW, but I didn't like him. He watched me from under his thick black eyebrows and smelled like Mr. Vanderhoff. Daisy Lampkin, our black suffragette friend, introduced us to W. E. B. Du Bois when he was in Pittsburgh on NAACP business. Daisy was a real firecracker. I'd never seen a woman with so much energy and passion for justice.

As the night wore on, we'd drink homemade wine that Nora made and sing Joe Hill's songs, “The Tramp,” “There Is Power in a Union,” and my favorite, “The Rebel Girl.”

“That's the Rebel Girl, that's the Rebel Girl, to the working class she's a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy to the fighting Rebel Boy.”
Ruben came with Mother Jones one time too, but we didn't even say hello.

 

On cold nights, when the temperature outside was below zero and the coal heater stove couldn't keep up, the three of us slept together in Mrs. Kelly's big bed, Nora, Sophie, and I. We'd snuggle under the feather quilt in our long flannel nightgowns and call ourselves the three bears. Nora was the papa, though she dressed the most womanly, Mrs. Kelly the mama, and I was Baby Bear. We'd laugh so hard, Mrs. Kelly would have to run to the potty to pee.

16

Dreams

Lately, I've been bothered by dreams, and I suspect Mr. Hester's presence in the house has affected me.

First I dream of Lawrence.

We're walking along the boardwalk in Chicago on a warm fall day. He's a tall, slim man with the yellow hair of a Swede and light blue eyes. I'm sixteen, and when his baby kicks, I grab his hand to show him, then step up on a park bench and leap on his back. Laughing, Lawrence runs around the park, holding my legs, my arms outstretched like a seagull. “I'm flying!” I yell.

My face is wet when I wake. It's been so long since I was young and in love. A pounding on the door downstairs jerks me out of my tears.

 

December 29, 1929. Dark moon, dark night for travel.

Unexpected summons to the home of Mrs. Clara Wetsel of Liberty. She was in labor with her fourth baby and having heavy bleeding. Her husband and she didn't want to call on Dr. Blum because they're still beholden to him for forty-five dollars after her husband, J.K., lost his arm at the sawmill.

Clara gave birth one hour after I got there, and I gave her some pennyroyal tea, which caused her to cramp, and massaged her uterus until the clots came out and the bleeding stopped. (Reminder to myself for next spring! Grow more pennyroyal, as it's useful for many things, including getting fleas off the dogs.) I was paid a loaf of bread and a bushel of potatoes. Got back into bed and dropped into sleep as if I'd never been disturbed.

 

Ruben

The second dream is of my late husband.

The Polish Club is crowded with steelworkers and radicals. There's a smell of tobacco and beer. Ruben sits at the end of a long table, surrounded by friends.

Ruben's a big man, over six four, with a large jaw and a flat nose like a prizefighter, but his brown eyes snap with intelligence and good humor. His stories are funnier and his laugh louder and more infectious than anyone else's. Even if he weren't wearing a red shirt open at the throat, he'd be hard not to notice.

He winks at me and the pink rushes into my cheeks. When I get up to buy a glass of cold cider, he meets me at the bar, spins me around, and gives me a kiss.

Waking to the cold room, I can still taste his mouth, feel his familiar skin, one day from a shave, and his curly wild hair. I run my hand across the bed, reaching for him. He always took the left-hand side.

 

My socialist husband didn't start out to be a union organizer. He wasn't ever a miner or a factory worker, which embarrassed him if it ever came up. He was a college graduate from the University of Pennsylvania (the same school Mr. Hester went to, now that I think of it) and a writer for the
Pittsburgh Press.
In December of 1907, as a green reporter, he was sent to get a story about the Monongah mine explosion in West Virginia, fifty miles southwest of Pittsburgh.

“I spent a week there,” he tells me on our first date over coffee and crullers at the German café near the Point. “And it changed my life, talking to the widows and the priests watching the bodies being brought out of the mine.

“The corpses were carried on stretchers by the dozens and taken to the morgue, where a steady stream of people filed past day after day. Three hundred and sixty-two boys and men, dead, burned, mangled, leaving two hundred fifty widows and over a thousand children without support. Three hundred and sixty.” The big man has tears in his eyes. “When relatives or friends recognized a miner the wails would rip the gray sky open . . .

“There was one guy, the coroner, Mr. Amos, who had been on duty since the first man was found. I don't know how he did it, day in and day out, looking at all those bodies, cataloging them, wading through the deep sorrow.

“Outside the mine openings and in front of the morgue, masses of mostly women stood in the rain shivering, braving the cold to get a chance, one last time, to see the face of their dead. Most spoke Italian, but you could be deaf and dumb and still understand, just from the tear-stained faces.

“I talked to one rescue worker, a mining engineer they sent over from Torrington State College. He let it drop that it was so dangerous down under that even the trained rescuers had been pulled out for three days. Fire belched from one of the holes, and you could smell burning flesh, but there was no way to get to the victims. They were probably all dead anyway . . .”

Ruben stops to chew his lip, looking away. It's a strange conversation for a first date. Ragtime tinkles on the player piano.

“A mine inspector I'd met at the Monongah tipped me off about the Darr Mine in Westmoreland County, twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. Said there was a ventilation problem there and that, as usual, the foreman from the Pittsburgh Coal Company told him they'd get to work on it.

“Not two weeks later, I was up at the Darr, doing a piece on unsafe mining practices, when
it
blew up. I was right there, heard the explosion myself that time, felt the earth shake, saw the women and children trying to dig their fathers, brothers, and sons out with their bare hands. I joined them, scratching the earth until it was clear that another two hundred thirty-nine miners were dead. No one survived but the few men at the opening . . .” He stops his story and looks straight at me.

“This is crazy,” he chides himself, wiping his face. “Let's dance.”

Someone put a polka roll in the player piano. My napkin fell to the floor as Ruben pulled me up. He was a big man but light on his feet. We danced to escape the sound of the explosions, the mothers crying, the dead miners' bodies piling up at the morgue. Everyone was clapping as we whirled around the room. Half the time, my feet missed the floor.

I'd been with a few other men before Ruben: Lawrence, of course, and Michael the glassblower and Peter from the Brotherhood of Russian Workers. We were all anarchists or socialists then, or leaning that way. That first night with Ruben, we celebrated Henry Ford's announcement that he was giving all his employees an eight-hour workday. My love felt bad he couldn't take me home to his all-men boardinghouse near the steel mills, so I took him home with me. Nora and Mrs. Kelly were already asleep, but they wouldn't care.

Oh, Ruben . . . heart of my heart. I am so sorry.