Dark Mondays

KATHERINE’S STORY

She knew the marriage had been a mistake by the time they stepped off the train.

All the same, she smiled and waited patiently as Bert got their suitcases from the porter. She had determined to make a life as different from her mother’s as was possible; that meant making the marriage work, whether or not Bert was the man she had envisioned him to be when she gave up college for him.

This was a pretty place, at least. There were big, green mountains and trees, and the little train station was quite rustic if not exactly charming. Lean men in overalls, red clay thick on their workboots, waited in a silent line as goods were unloaded: sacks of feed, sacks of fertilizer, wire cages full of baby chicks. The chicks peeped and poked their tiny beaks through the mesh. The heat was shimmering, sticky.

Bert approached with the luggage. She turned to smile at him but he was looking past her, grinning and hefting one suitcase in a wave.

“Pop!”

One of the lean men was loading cages into the back of an old truck. He turned and saw Bert, and nodded in acknowledgment. Bert ran toward him and she followed.

“Hey, Pop!”

“Hey,” the man responded, looking them up and down. “You’re early.”

“I got the train times wrong,” Bert said.

“Well, that’s you.” Mr. Loveland shook his head. His gaze moved briefly to Katherine. “This the wife?”

“Yes—”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Loveland, I’ve heard so much about you,” said Katherine, smiling as she twisted the strap of her handbag. He just nodded, considering her.

“We got your room ready, anyways,” he said.

“Oh, thank you—”

“You may’s well put those in the back,” he told Bert, gesturing at the suitcases. Bert stepped close and hoisted the suitcases into the truck bed. As he did so he kicked one of the wire cages and there was a pitiable cheeping from the chicks inside.

“Oh, Bert, you’ve hurt one of them,” Katherine cried, stooping down. “It’s this black one, look! I think his little foot is squashed. There’s blood—”

“Oh! Sorry—”

“Things happen,” said Mr. Loveland.

The ride to their new home was silent and uncomfortable. Literally; she rode perched on Bert’s lap, which would have been funny and romantic under other circumstances. They bumped along unpaved roads for miles, up into the mountains, far out of town, before turning down a gravel drive to a frame house set back among trees. There was an enclosed porch running the length of the front.

Katherine hopped out and waited, clutching her handbag, as the men unloaded the cages and carried them around to the chicken pen in the side yard. Mr. Loveland remained with the chicks, opening the cages and dumping their contents into the pen. Bert got their suitcases again and she followed him into the silent house.

To her dismay, she saw two cots set up on the porch and an old chiffonier, clearly intended for them.

“Are we living out here?” she whispered.

Bert looked down at the cots. “Oh,” he said. “I guess so. Well, it’s hot, ain’t it? We’ll be all right.” He dropped the suitcases and pushed through the door into the house. She followed him, wondering where she was going to put her things when they arrived.

“Ma!”

The kitchen was small and dark, and the woman kneading biscuit dough at the table filled it effectively. She looked up at them. She had Bert’s strong jaw. She did not smile as she said: “Oh.”

“Hey!” Bert edged forward and embraced her.

“You’ll get your good clothes floured,” Mrs. Loveland told him, looking over his shoulder at Katherine. “You’re Kathy, I guess.”

“Yes, Mother Loveland, Katherine,” she said, smiling and nodding. “I’m awfully glad to meet you—though I guess we’re a little early. I hope that’s not an inconvenience.”

“Katherine, huh?” Mrs. Loveland looked coldly amused. “Now, that’s funny. Bert told me you were born in Chapel Hill, but you sure don’t talk like it.”

“Well, I was,” Katherine stammered, “but I grew up in New York, you know. I studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, did Bert tell you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Loveland.

She was miserably homesick, through the weeks of Indian summer. Without his football sweater Bert no longer looked much like Nelson Eddy; and he’d changed, as a son will change in his mother’s house. The other illusion, about coming home to the South and having a big, loving family instead of living in boarding houses with Mother and Anne—that was fading too.

She saw clearly enough that she’d better make Mrs. Loveland like her, but her attempts to help out were dismissed—she didn’t know how to cook. She and Mother and Anne had eaten in restaurants, or heated Campbell’s soup over Sterno cans in their rooms. She took on the task of feeding the chicks, but her decision to make a pet of the crippled black one earned her contempt even from Bert. She persisted; made it a separate pen, gave it special care, named it. It lived and grew, to Mrs. Loveland’s disgust.

Her things came, in far too many crates, and Bert and Mr. Loveland grumbled as they stacked them in the barn. With them came the letter from Mother, and she cried as she read it. She could hear the stern, quiet voice so clearly, she could see Mother looking up at her over her steel spectacles, as term papers waited for grading.

So she couldn’t write to Mother about how miserable she was, not without seeming like a worthless failure. Mother would send another gloomy letter that talked around the shame and scandal of The Divorce while never actually bringing it up. She had never discussed it, never once in all the years Katherine and her little sister had been growing up, rattling around in the back of the Ford as Mother drove from teaching job to teaching job.

All that Katherine knew about The Divorce, she had learned from the servants, when they stayed at Grandfather’s house in those intervals in which Mother was broke. Philanderer… Miss Kate had her pride, she wouldn’t stand for it… threw him out… never gave him a second chance, never spoke of him again…

And once a neighbor’s little girl had asked Katherine if it was true her mamma and daddy had had a Divorce, and she’d run home crying to ask Mother, who was taking tea with Grandmother. Mother’s face had seemed to turn to stone; she stood and towered over Katherine, and she had looked like the statue of the Goddess Athena on the library steps. She’d swept out of the room without a word. Grandmother had set down her teacup and held out her arms, but all she’d told Katherine in the end was: Some things are best not spoken of, child.

In the present, Katherine endured. Most of her clothing was inappropriate for daily life on a farm. Under Mrs. Loveland’s blank stare she was stupidly inept, burnt clothes while ironing them, broke dishes while washing them.

The warm weather ended and it rained, and in the leaking barn her books got soaked. She carried them into the house frantically, armloads spread and opened before the stove to dry, weeping as she peeled back wet pages from the color plates: A Child’s Garden of Verses with its Maxfield Parrish illustrations, Kay Nielsen’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Myths and Enchantment Tales, the Volland Mother Goose, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. When Mrs. Loveland saw them her jaw dropped. “You still look at picture books?” she said.

The winter was mild, so she and Bert continued to sleep on the enclosed porch.

One night she dreamed that she was back at college, that Mother had left her at the entrance to the dormitory and she’d gone in to find that the building was dark, deserted. Everyone had gone home for Christmas. She turned in panic and hurried outside again, and to her horror saw Mother driving away.

She ran after the car, after its red winking taillights. She chased it for miles. There was brilliant moonlight, blue-white, so bright it hurt her eyes. She lost the car at last and stood there alone, sobbing, and then a strange little girl came to her and told her everything would be all right.

Then she woke, and found herself alone on a country road in her thin nightgown, in the terrifying silence of the night. Had she been sleepwalking? She was more than half a mile from the house. Teeth chattering, she hobbled back, and Bert did not wake when she crawled back into bed.

She was unable to get warm again, and lay awake for hours. She hadn’t walked in her sleep since the winter she’d been twelve, in New York, when the letter came informing Mother that Daddy had died of pneumonia. He’d been living in a hotel only the other side of Central Park, all that time; she might have stolen away and visited him, if she’d only known.

And in her dreams, for months afterward, she kept trying to cross the skating pond to reach him. She could see Daddy so clearly, standing under a lamp on the other side, but she knew he didn’t know she was there, and she knew if she didn’t run to him he’d never know. She never managed to cross the ice, somehow; and once she started awake on the sidewalk, with Fifth Avenue roaring before her like a river and a horrified doorman clutching her arm to stop her plunging into the traffic.

By April she knew without doubt that the baby was on the way. Bert took the news stolidly, no least sign of happiness at the prospect of a little child of their own.

Mrs. Loveland shook her head. “You’re going to be sorry you didn’t wait,” she said. Katherine very nearly retorted, Tell that to Bert, but turned away and went to go feed the black chicken.

She gave up any attempt to be a good farm wife, and nobody seemed to care. She luxuriated in her freedom; took long walks alone, now that spring had come and the dogwoods were flowering. Where the red clay road cut across the hills she imagined she’d walked into a Thomas Hart Benton painting. This was the only part of the South that was the way she’d dreamed it would be.

One afternoon she was passing a house set close to the road, and heard music: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, to her astonishment, sounding scratched and tinny as though it were coming out of the horn of an old Victrola but still flowing magnificently on. She leaned against the split rail fence, listening, rapt. Someone was moving inside the house, through the window she saw someone dancing. Wild, free-form, arms flung out. A second later the woman pirouetted close to the window and saw her. She stopped dancing immediately.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Katherine, blushing. “I just—the music was so beautiful. I love Tchaikovsky, but there aren’t any classical radio stations here—”

“I know,” said the woman, pushing up the window the rest of the way and leaning out. Her face was pale and sharp, her gaze fixed. “It is an absolute purgatory for anyone of any culture. Or decent breeding. Tell me, are you a devotee of Beethoven?”

“Well, yes—”

“Please, come in. Will you come in?” said the woman. She ducked inside and slammed the window. By the time Katherine had come reluctantly up the path, the woman was standing at the open door.

“I am Amelia DuPlessis Hickey,” she said, inclining in a queenly sort of way. “I would introduce my dear husband, but he is currently traveling abroad on necessary business. Please, do come in! And you would be?”

“Katherine MacQuarrie,” she replied, and then added, “Loveland.”

“I see,” said the woman, as the music behind her wound down to hissing silence. “Would that be of the Greenville MacQuarries? With the DeLafayette MacQuarrie who perished at Gettysburg?”

“I don’t think so,” said Katherine, stepping across the threshold. “I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about my father’s people—”

“Ah! Well, things happen,” said Mrs. Hickey graciously. “Won’t you stay for tea?”

“Why, thank you,” said Katherine, and recoiled as something sprang up out of a packing box beside her and screamed.

“Now, Peaseblossom, that won’t do!” said Mrs. Hickey. “I really must apologize, Mrs. Loveland. Pray allow me to introduce my beautiful little geniuses: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and the baby, Mustardseed!”

She was referring to the pale and sullen children who crouched together in the corner. The two boys wore only overalls, rolled up thickly at the ankles; the girl wore a flour-sack dress. They had retreated behind what appeared to be a wooden model of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the pieces scattered on the bare floor, it seemed that they themselves had been constructing it. They were fox-faced, emaciated, staring with enormous dark eyes. A whimper from the floor drew her attention to an ashen baby waving its skinny arms from an apple box.

After a moment of appalled silence Katherine said:

“How clever. You named them after the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream, I guess?”

“I adore Shakespeare. Another passion of mine. My grandfather, Zadoc DuPlessis (for we are of the Chaney County DuPlessises, you see) had the good fortune to see the immortal Junius Booth in Charleston where, I believe, he was portraying Hamlet,” said Mrs. Hickey, stoking up the stove. She put a saucepan of water on the burner. Katherine looked around. The room was as filthy as a bare room can be. There were ancient books stacked everywhere, piled against the walls, and three crates of phonograph records. In the corner by the window was, yes, a Victrola with its morning-glory trumpet.

“Gosh, how lucky,” said Katherine. There were no chairs, so she wandered over to the children. “How are you all today?”

They shrank back. The little girl bared her teeth.

“I do beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Hickey, coming swiftly to her side. “They are terribly shy with strangers. We have, alas, nearly no social life. Now, you come out here and be ladies and gentlemen for our caller! Perhaps then we’ll go out for a Co-colee.”

The children blinked and scrambled out, lining up awkwardly against the wall.

“They do love Coca-Cola,” said Mrs. Hickey.

It was two hours before Katherine could get away. Mrs. Hickey told her life story: her family had once owned most of three counties, but of course The War had altered their circumstances, though not so grievously she hadn’t been raised with the best of everything and taught to appreciate all that was exquisite in the arts.

And she’d given it all up for love; so now she rusticated here, teaching her brilliant offspring herself. The boys were clearly destined to be engineers. Why, they’d made that bridge themselves from nothing more than slatwood, all you had to do was show them a picture and they’d build anything! And little Peaseblossom had inherited a love of great literature, she just devoured books. The children listened to all this silent and expressionless.

Later, back at the Lovelands’, Katherine went out to feed the chickens. She picked up the little black hen and buried her face in its feathers, feeling her hot tears spilling, and prayed that she wouldn’t turn out like Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey.

Summer came and went, and autumn arrived with cornshocks and pumpkins. In the early hours of October 30, Katherine went into labor. Bert joked about the baby being a little Halloween goblin as he drove her to the hospital in town. She wasn’t laughing by the time they got to the hospital. The pains were terrible.

The nurses got her into a room and Bert told her he had to get back, that he’d come see her that evening. She begged him to tell the nurses to give her something for the pain. The head nurse came in and told her they were having difficulty locating Dr. Jackson; as soon as they heard from him they’d give her something.

All the interminable morning and afternoon, they were unable to find him, had no idea where he might be, and at last they gave Katherine drugs anyway. The relief was blissful, unbelievable, and she received with floaty equanimity the news that the baby was turned wrong. “Well, just turn it around,” she told them, smiling.

The bright window darkened and it was night. She floated in and out of a dream about Halloween, big yellow pumpkins on gateposts, little children scurrying in the dark with papier-mache faces. But that wouldn’t be until tomorrow night, would it? They gave her more drugs. Trick or treat!

Suddenly there was a nurse screaming and crying, praying to Jesus. Her sister had called from New Jersey. She’d been listening to Charlie McCarthy and when Nelson Eddy came on she’d switched away. (Katherine felt mildly outraged. How could anyone switch off Nelson Eddy?) The man on the radio had said Earth was being invaded by Martians! They’d come in a big cylinder and were burning people up! State troopers too! It was the end of the world!

The baby was turned around now but the head was too big. The head was stuck. There was a colored lady talking to her soothingly, wiping her face with a cold cloth. You have to work, honey, she kept saying. Nobody could find news of the invasion on the little radio in the cafeteria, but a man ran in and said he’d heard strange lights had begun to appear in the sky, were swooping and circling the town, had they landed yet? There was one. It was right outside the hospital. It looked like a soup plate on fire. The colored lady was crying now too but she stayed right there.

Sometime in the night the doctor came at last. Not Dr. Jackson. It was a strange doctor.

It was afternoon before Katherine woke up. Nobody said anything about Martians, and she assumed it had all been a crazy nightmare. Her little girl was fine, just fine, they assured her; but she had to ask and ask before anybody would bring the baby for her to hold.

When they did bring her in, Katherine’s first thought was: Why, she looks like Mickey Mouse. Both her eyes were blacked and all the dome of her head was one black-purple bruise.

“Oh, that’s normal, sugar,” a nurse told her, too quickly. “She just had a big head, that was all. The bruises’ll go away.” The baby lay quiet and waxen in her arms, barely moving, but they told her that was normal too.

It wasn’t normal. Bette Jean was an exquisite baby, with delicate white skin, with perfect little features, with enormous solemn eyes the color of aquamarines. Her hair was black and wavy. She looked like a doll, but by her first birthday she was still unable to sit up.

When it became impossible to deny that something was wrong, Katherine wrote to Mother. Mother sent money—Anne had the lead in a Broadway show now, she could afford to—and told her to take the baby to a specialist.

There was a doctor in Chapel Hill who saw “slow” children. It was most of a day’s drive in the old truck but Bert took them, tight-lipped and miserable. Bette Jean stared at the trees, the sky, the mountains, and exclaimed in her funny little unformed voice, a liquid sound like a child playing with panpipes.

In the waiting room were retarded children, spastic children, children blank and focused inward on private and inexplicable games, gaunt listless children sprawling across their parents’ laps. Overalled fathers silent, shirtwaisted mothers staring like wounded tigers. Bert took one look and murmured that he had to see the man about the mortgage, and he left. “It’s all right,” Katherine whispered to Bette Jean, who wobbled her head and looked astonished.

Through the transom she heard a man’s voice raised. “She’s still not thriving. You can’t be following my orders! I told you she needs lots of green and yellow vegetables. What on earth have you been feeding her?”

“Corn bread,” replied the raw cracker voice, defensively. “Corn’s yellow, ain’t it?”

Katherine shuddered.

The doctor was tired, and perhaps not as kind as he might have been. He listened to Katherine’s story, interrupting frequently as he examined Bette Jean. When he had finished he leaned back against a cabinet and took off his glasses to rub his eyes.

“Well, Mrs. Loveland—your baby has spastic paralysis. I’d conclude she was brain-damaged at birth, either by the forceps or the fact that birth was delayed so long. There is no cure for her condition, unfortunately. Given that the family is of limited means—I’d recommend you put her in a home.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Tears welled in Katherine’s eyes, but the doctor raised his hand.

“She’d receive decent care. Do you understand that her illness is only the result of an accident? You’re young; there is no reason why you can’t have healthy, normal children after this. When you do, you’ll find yourself increasingly hard-pressed to give this abnormal child the attention she’ll require every day of her life. You owe it to the child, to your prospective children—and, I need hardly say, your husband—to put this unfortunate occurrence behind you.”

Katherine wept and refused. The doctor wanted to speak to Bert, too, but he never put in an appearance. He was nowhere in sight when Katherine carried Bette Jean out to the truck. They waited another half-hour before he came up the street, unsteady, and climbed into the cab. He’d had a drink or two. It was a long ride back, in the dark.

When they understood the diagnosis, Bert and his parents argued at once that the only sensible thing to do would be to follow the doctor’s advice and place Bette Jean in an institution. Katherine screamed her refusal, wrote a tearful letter to Mother. Mother received the news with her customary stoicism and responded by inviting Katherine to bring Bette Jean to New York for Christmas, thoughtfully sending money for the train fare.

It was almost Heaven. No boarding houses anymore: a fashionable apartment nowadays, because Anne’s name was in lights on Broadway, and there was talk about Hollywood. And, oh, the Metropolitan Museum! The bookstores! The music! The shows! Katherine took Bette Jean to Central Park to watch the ice skaters, and Bette Jean stared and stared from her arms in wonder, never cried at all.

But there were telephone calls, there were letters and visits from all her aunts and uncles, who’d loaned Mother money over the lean years, who’d shaken their heads over The Divorce. Every one of them told her to put Bette Jean in an institution, for the sake of her marriage if nothing else. After the latest such call she put down the phone and wandered disconsolately out to the sitting room, where Anne had Bette Jean on her lap at the big Steinway piano and was pretending to play a duet with her. Bette Jean was whooping in delight. Mother looked up from her book, peering at her over her glasses.

“And what did your Uncle James have to say?”

“Just—more of the same.” Katherine glared at Mother. She wanted to seize Mother by the shoulders and scream at her, but what could she say? If you hadn’t gotten The Divorce, I’d never have been in such a hurry to get married to the first handsome boy I met. You never once explained it to us. You never once apologized. Not you. Why should you apologize, when you were entirely the offended party?

Oh, when will I ever escape from your life?

Instead, Katherine sank down by Mother’s chair. She drooped forward and leaned her head on Mother’s arm, wanting to cry.

“They want me to put her away and let strangers care for her,” she said. “They say it’ll be more convenient. They say I’ll forget about her when I have another baby.”

Mother stared straight forward.

“Don’t do it, child,” she said at last. “The human heart doesn’t work that way.”

Katherine raised her head, thinking: What would you know about human hearts?

“You’d regret it the rest of your life,” Mother said. “Believe me, daughter. Our emotions don’t answer to reason.”

Bette Jean caught a cold on the train going back; she was feverish and wailing when Bert picked them up at the train station. Katherine sat with her in the rocking chair beside the kerosene heater, rubbed her tiny chest with Vicks VapoRub, desperately fought off pneumonia. She slept sitting up with the child’s head cradled on her shoulder. Bert bought a steam vaporizer and set it up beside them, with the pan of water and eucalyptus oil simmering over its little flame. It was a week before she felt safe leaving Bette Jean long enough to attend to any chores.

Scattering feed for the chickens, she looked across at the pen where she’d kept the black one and saw that it was empty. When she questioned Bert he looked away, and said at last:

“Ma had me kill it. It couldn’t hardly walk, Katherine, you know that.”

She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She went into the house. Bette Jean was awake, and her eyes tracked to follow Katherine as she came close and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Ma-ma.

Katherine was so shocked she just sat staring. After a moment the voice came again, odd and artificial-sounding as a doll’s but with a note of pleading. Bette Jean’s mouth was slack, did not move, but her eyes were intent.

Mama.

Trembling, Katherine reached out and took Bette Jean’s hand. Her little fingers, long and white, were ice cold. Katherine raised them to her lips and kissed them.

It was so strange she wouldn’t think about it, but it kept happening; little silent greetings, complaints, questions, observations. Nobody else heard them.

It’s the stress, Katherine told herself. It’s being shut up here with the Lovelands. I’m going mad like Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey.

She found herself wandering in the direction of Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey’s residence one morning, hoping for comfort, hoping the visit would reassure her of her own normalcy. She carried Bette Jean with her; she never left her alone with Mrs. Loveland anymore.

The music this time was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, rolling out like clouds of attar of roses or patchouli, wildly out of place in this country of red clay roads and split rail fences. As Katherine came up on the front porch, the music stopped and she heard Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey shriek: “Mustardseed! Hide!”

“It’s only me, ma’am. Katherine Loveland,” she said cautiously, raising her voice. A moment later and Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey opened the door. She looked paler, thinner, crazier.

“Why, Mrs. Loveland, how delightful to see you! All is well, Mustardseed. Do come in! And who is this charming young lady?”

“This is my daughter, Bette Jean.” Katherine stepped inside. There was no sign of the older children; the new baby in the apple box might have been Mustardseed, except for the fact that Katherine could see a wraithlike toddler crouching behind the Victrola.

“Oh, what exquisite eyes she has!” said Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey, holding out her arms. Reluctantly, Katherine let her hold Bette Jean, who went to her without complaint. Katherine swallowed hard.

“She’s…”

“Unique, yes, I can see that,” said Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey, smiling at Bette Jean. Bette Jean stared at her and then smiled back.

“It’s all right,” said Katherine, waving at the child behind the Victrola. “Are the others out playing?”

Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey’s face twisted for a moment. “Why, no,” she said. “They are, in fact, attending a special school now. For remarkable children. The county is providing their scholarships. I do feel the void, of course, but… I haven’t introduced my youngest! Little Ariel. He was an unexpected blessing. Yet they are all blessings, are they not?”

“Of course,” Katherine murmured.

“What glorious hair, as well,” remarked Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey, stroking Bette Jean’s curls. “Mustardseed’s might as well be dandelion down, mightn’t it, Mustardseed? Do come out and be sociable, now; we are amongst friends.”

Mustardseed stood up and trotted over. He leaned on Katherine’s knee, startling her, but she patted his head. He looked up at her out of pale eyes sharply focused.

“Has she tried to speak yet?” said Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey.

“Only to me,” said Katherine. “I mean… I understand her… she sort of…”

“Oh, I comprehend,” said Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey. “What a rare gift! Communication de pensées, they call it, you know. Thought transference. The mind, unfettered by the demands of the body, refines and expands itself beyond the abilities of the common mortal intellect. As they say the blind develop extraordinary musical gifts. Nature compensates, you see.”

“I’ve heard that said,” said Katherine. Her own mind shoved the idea away reflexively—clairvoyance, for heaven’s sake!—and then, with hesitance, considered again. What if there were some truth to it? Why should it be sane and rational to believe in angels in Heaven, and not in something like this?

“Indeed. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” said Mrs. DuPlessis-Hickey. “Angels and ministers of grace do defend us, or so I truly believe.” She leaned forward and patted Katherine’s hand. “It keeps one from despair.”

She got a book on clairvoyance out of the library, on one of their trips into town, but it had been written by a fairground charlatan. Its claims were ridiculous. Still, Sigmund Freud seemed to have believed that something like mind-reading had existed, or so the charlatan stated. Katherine tried to research the matter further, but the little town library had no books by Freud at all.

“Looks like it’ll be another hard winter,” said Bert, at the breakfast table. He watched Katherine spooning grits into Bette Jean’s mouth. She had outgrown the high chair, and Katherine had converted one of the kitchen chairs with cushions and clothesline.

“Better hope that baby doesn’t get another cold,” said Mrs. Loveland, setting a plate of ham on the table. “You’ll be up all night wiping snot out of her nose. And if you don’t keep her setting up, it’ll turn into double pneumonia.”

“She’s much stronger,” said Katherine. Mrs. Loveland grunted, shaking her head.

“Some night, she’s just going to stop breathing,” she said.

Mama, careful. Careful.

A long letter from Mother: Anne had been offered a contract at RKO studios in Hollywood. Mother had quit teaching and was going out on the train to look for an apartment for them. It promised, she said, to be quite an adventure for a lady her age.

Katherine sat reading the letter over, uncertain how she ought to feel. She had a momentary vision of red taillights winking, receding, leaving her in darkness.

Mama. Bette Jean was staring at her, and one little white hand beat against the blanket with a motion like a leaf fluttering. Mama!

Katherine went into one of her trunks for writing paper and a pen. She began to write, hesitantly at first and then swiftly, with decision.

Mother sent the money. Katherine made it easy on Bert; it was only for the child’s health, after all. She needed a warmer climate. They both knew it would end in a divorce, but the word had lost its power over Katherine. Bert was so relieved he became kind, attentive, made the last days almost nice.

The journey was interminable on the train, but her heart was singing the whole way. Bette Jean sat propped beside her, in her best dress. With her tiny feet stuck out before her in their patent leather shoes, she looked more like a doll than ever. She whooped and moaned in excitement, staring at everything, fascinated; and the silent voice kept up its running commentary too. Mama, nice! Mama happy now? They came into California and Katherine felt as though she’d escaped into her books at last, because it all looked like a Maxfield Parrish illustration: the smooth golden hills crowned with stately oak trees, the glimpses of Spanish-style houses with their red tiled roofs and white walls, the green acres of orange trees in blossom. The fragrance came through the windows of the train for miles.

“We’re going to Hollywood, Bette Jean!” Katherine told her. “We’ll see all the movie stars. We’ll be together, and we’ll never be cold anymore, and this is such a beautiful place, don’t you think? Are we about to have adventures?”

There was a wordless sense of affirmation. Bette Jean’s little face was slack, her limbs useless; but her thoughtful soul looked out and wondered. What was so strange in the idea that she might have found some way to communicate? In a world so full of heartbreak and disappointments, why not indulge in a little irrational hope?

As they neared the station, the porter came to see if she’d need any help getting Bette Jean down to the platform.

“Well, hello, Miss Big Eyes!” he said, bending to look into Bette Jean’s face. “My goodness, that baby’s got pretty eyes.”

“Thank you,” said Katherine, smiling.

“My sister’s boy was born like her,” he said, standing straight and pulling down Katherine’s suitcase.

Katherine started to say, Oh, I’m so sorry. She paused and said: “They’re a blessing from God, aren’t they?”

“Yes, ma’am, they surely are,” the porter replied. “And I surely believe they’re sent down here to Earth for a good reason.”

Katherine stepped down from the train, with her daughter and her suitcase. She had come to the land where miracles happened to ordinary people. She lifted Bette Jean to her shoulder and walked away down the platform, into the sunlight.