Calling Me Home (30 page)

I hurt for her. As much as my own too-young, too-ignorant single mother had bungled things—and made me nuts with her dependence on me now—I’d never, ever, questioned her love. I always knew that, in her weird, unreliable, impulsive, ridiculous way, she loved me. I’d seen the pride in her eyes when she watched me with my own children, or watched me work my magic on a customer’s hair—even if she didn’t understand my methods or relate to my self-determination. Sure, Momma had let me down, plenty of times, but never in the way Miss Isabelle’s mother failed her.

Up ahead and over to the east, in the now-visible distance, a series of bridges spanned the Ohio River and skyscrapers rose in a clump on the other side, creating the illusion we were about to cross over onto an island—though, from studying the map along the way, I knew it wasn’t so.

Miss Isabelle’s eyes filled with something I struggled to identify. Like a ball of rubber bands, all mixed up in their colors and textures, the emotions in her eyes were a jumble.

Finally, there it was: Cincinnati.

The City of Seven Hills, Miss Isabelle had said they called it. There were more hills than that, if you were counting.

31

Isabelle, 1940

M
Y SKIN WAS
young and elastic. I hadn’t put on much weight during my pregnancy; first the depression and then the humidity and heat had stolen my appetite. Between that and the baby’s coming early, I’d hardly shown, and my hip bones had scarcely shifted. Unclothed and up close, my faint stretch marks could have been detected by an experienced eye, but nobody was looking. Perhaps my breasts were fuller, but the midwife had instructed me to bind them tightly with rags when my milk began to come in, and with no baby to suckle, they were no beacon of motherhood. My old dresses soon fit again.

When I emerged from the cocoon of my bedroom, Mother said I could come and go freely—under one condition: I must never admit I’d been in Shalerville during the time she’d claimed I was gone. Otherwise, she showed no interest in my whereabouts or anything I did. I suppose she was relieved to be finished with the distasteful business of ridding us of my baby.

Granting her wish was easy. I had no desire to explain the last seven or eight months to anyone. Nor did I initially desire to leave. It wasn’t that I was content to stay home, reading, sleeping, or—more often—gazing out the windows. If anything, I was numb. I was unmotivated, uninspired.

Undone.

Finally, though, after a month or so of doing mostly nothing, and when the heat let up, I became unsettled.

I don’t know what flipped the switch. I simply woke to life again—even if it meant feeling the pain intensely while my mind explored ideas and plans. Suddenly, another minute in the house where I’d been tried, convicted, and held prisoner for the crime of following my heart was too long. And after my eighteenth birthday that fall, my mother could do little to keep me under her thumb, even if she’d wanted to.

The Reds were nearing their first World Series victory in twenty-one years, and everyone was obsessed with baseball. No one paid attention to me as I began making daylong journeys to the city. I purchased coffee or tea in exchange for café seats, where I combed through secondhand newspapers, flipping past the ragged sports pages to the nearly as ragged classifieds. Debates over the fine points of the most recent loss or victory were my background noise as I scanned for jobs available to a bright young female with no real training or specific skills—but none that would transform me into one of the eerie young/old women I witnessed streaming from factories or plants when end-of-day whistles sounded. My soul felt ancient, but I would need a strong, healthy body if I must support myself indefinitely. If I couldn’t have Robert, I wanted no other man, and I would no longer depend on my family. I would take care of myself.

But I kept one eye on the newsprint and the other on the teeming sidewalks, praying one day I’d glimpse him.

After a time, I felt bold enough to stroll past the rooming house where we’d spent our wedding night. I did so several times, on different days, desperate to spy him climbing the steps to the porch at the end of a workday. But I didn’t see him. Finally, I dared climb the steps myself. The landlady stepped back, seemingly startled, perhaps even frightened to discover me on her doorstep. She peered past me—to see if I was alone, I suppose, or whether the angry men who’d barged into her home and business accompanied me.

“What do you want?” she said. I asked whether Robert still lived there. She shook her head, avoiding my eyes. “He never came back since that day,” she said. “Took everything and never came back at all. Told him I couldn’t refund the rent he’d paid ahead, but he didn’t mind.” She cocked her head. “Not here for that, are you? Can’t do anything for you if so.”

I assured her I wasn’t looking for money, though I asked about the thimble. She denied having seen it on the nightstand or under the bed when she cleaned. I hoped that meant Robert had gathered it up with whatever he took when he left. The woman closed the door on me as soon as I gave her the opportunity.

Sarah Day invited me into her kitchen, clucked her tongue, and gathered me close. I didn’t mention the baby, but something told me she knew, the way she released me carefully from her embrace and studied my hips and bosom when she thought I wouldn’t notice. But her story was no different. Neither she nor Reverend Day had seen or spoken to Robert since the day after our wedding, when she headed him off while my father and brothers took me home.

I tried to summon the nerve to go by the house in the small community where Robert and Nell had lived with their parents, the courage to walk to the church, to the arbor where I used to meet him and where we’d shared our first kisses, but fear paralyzed me. I didn’t know how Cora or Nell would react to seeing me. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to withstand their fury at me for costing them their jobs. I wasn’t even sure Robert would want to see me. I wondered if he’d been angry that I hadn’t tried to contact him. I wondered if he knew my mother had kept me prisoner. I wondered if he had any idea I’d carried his child … and lost her.

Though I contemplated the best course of action, though I hoped for a twist of events—coincidental or celestial—to bring us together again, I resigned myself to creating a life alone. I’d caused enough trouble already.

One day, an ad ran for a job, not giving many details other than it was a new business that needed one additional steady employee, no experience necessary. Everywhere else, I’d been summarily dismissed upon walking through the door to ask about a position. My slight stature must have put potential employers off—not to mention my lack of experience when the unemployment rolls still hadn’t recovered completely from the Great Depression. There was no telling how many people competed for a single position. I assumed this business owner would react the same way.

But not this time. He looked me over, asked to see my hands, studied how I held a few small tools, then told me about his new endeavor.

A popular camera company had introduced a new film that produced beautiful color slides, and the price of the film included processing and returning the slides to the customer already mounted and ready to project. People enjoyed showing off photos of vacations or family events, but mounting their own old-fashioned slides was tedious. This was the latest, greatest thing, a major time-saver, albeit a luxury. And the price reflected this luxury. This Cincy entrepreneur saw his opportunity. He’d perfected his own system of mounting the old-style glass slides. He produced large quantities of pressboard frames similar to the other company’s. People could bring batches of glass slides, and he would mount them at a fair price. And if they dropped them off one day, he guaranteed they could pick them up the next, instead of waiting on the postal system as the other film’s users had to do. To his great delight, business was booming. He couldn’t keep up. That was where I’d come in.

Mr. Bartel declared my small, nimble fingers a good fit for mounting slides. He warned me I’d better show up for work every day and on time, but I could start the next Monday, with Saturday afternoons and Sundays off.

It was Friday. I sped back to the coffee shop where I’d found the ad, hoping the newspaper was still, by some lucky chance, where I’d left it. If I were to start a job in Cincy on Monday, I would need a place to live and a way to pay the rent until I received my first wages.

The newspaper was scattered in sections around the shop, but I found the ads for rooming houses and scanned them for a few promising ones that claimed suitability for single young women, quality only. It was anyone’s guess whether the description fit now, as used and dried-up as I felt so soon after giving birth, emotionally bereft after losing my dream of love and family, but I could surely give the illusion of wholesomeness.

I walked right past the first house after noting its disheveled appearance—oily-looking men in undershirts hanging around the porch, smoking cigarettes, and a young woman leaning from a window in nothing more than a slip, calling to another man on the street. Quality?

The next house, though, was in a quiet neighborhood. It looked recently painted, and the stoop had been swept clean. The woman who answered the door was friendly and youngish, with two toddlers clinging to her skirts. She scanned me up and down and studied my shoes and clothing, apparently coming to the conclusion I would do. She agreed to hold the room until three o’clock the next day. If I returned with two weeks’ rent, the room would be mine. Her small attic-level room was pleasant, sunny, and clean. I could eat with the family for an extra fee or take my meals elsewhere, provided I notified her a day in advance.

My heart thumped as I calculated the amount—seven dollars for two weeks, nine if I included suppers. A small fortune. I realized now how hard Robert had worked to secure the rent for our room—only for it to go to waste almost right away. I’d never saved more than a few coins at a time from birthday or Christmas envelopes, and I’d spent what little I had accumulated on coffee, tea, and streetcar fares while looking for work.

The only solution I came up with was to approach my father. His inaction in the face of Mother’s determination, his refusal to speak a word against her, had finished me with him, but I figured he owed me at least this. I could talk him out of a measly ten dollars.

I hurried back to Shalerville, hoping to catch him before he left his office. He spent Friday afternoons there, catching up on paperwork and reading his medical journals, unless an emergency called him away. Patients with mild complaints were instructed by his nurse to call again Monday.

In my haste to exit the streetcar, I marveled at my body’s recuperation. Only weeks earlier, my insides would have protested, jarred by the thud of feet against curb.

I didn’t speak, gave the nurse no chance to stop me as I passed her, only rapping my knuckles hard against the solid door of my father’s consulting room before opening it. I caught my breath while he studied me, emotion seeping from his eyes. An odd mix—sadness, trepidation. “Isabelle?”

Is it really you,
his eyes asked,
or the phantom of your former self?
I wasn’t sure myself.

“Hello, Father.” The formal address still irritated my throat, dragged over my tongue like sandpaper, like the accusation it was. “I need ten dollars. Please don’t ask why.”

His gaze stayed on my face as he fumbled in his pocket for his wallet. He withdrew a slender stack of bills, only glancing down to identify a five and five ones. Before he bent them together and slid them across the desk, he added another five.

“Oh, Isabelle.” He sighed. “I won’t ask, but I will wonder. I suppose you’ve earned the right to your secrets now.”

His mouth’s droop got me. I admitted I’d found employment and a place to live in the city. I reminded him I was an adult now, eighteen, and that I hoped this time—if he knew where I’d gone and that I wasn’t doing anything to offend my mother, my brothers, or their strange moral code—they would leave me alone.

“I’ll tell your mother what you’ve decided. You’ll leave in peace,” he said. “And, honey … I’m sorry … for everything.”

Oh, Daddy.
I nearly cried the words aloud. Almost ran to his side to throw my arms around his neck and cling to him like a child. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t.

Money. Apologies. Running interference with my mother—at last. Even his own self-loathing.

It would never be enough. I started toward the door.

“Isabelle?”

I turned back reluctantly.

“Do you remember asking about the signs?”

I nodded, cautious. It seemed he wanted to make amends by engaging me in this conversation. Again, it was too late. But I waited.

“We’re not the only town with them, you know.”

I knew. I’d seen them here and there when we’d made road trips—as often in Ohio as in Kentucky. Intermarriage might have been legal there, but it didn’t mean there weren’t towns just like Shalerville.

Daddy continued: “Here in Shalerville, it was considered a more civilized action than some others you might hear about. Long before you were born, the good citizens of our city ran every Negro out of town.” His lip curled around the word
good.

I gaped. Negroes had lived in Shalerville? I’d assumed they’d simply never been there. Why would anyone have run them out?

“It was an era of fear. In many places, people didn’t know what to do about the freed Negro slaves. They felt they were encroaching on the land, threatening their livelihoods, so they used whatever excuses they could trump up to run them out of places—false accusations, making entire communities a scapegoat for one person’s crime. But not in Shalerville. Here, it wasn’t about that, they said. When Shalerville incorporated, the leaders thought the appearance of exclusivity would draw high-class residents. So they gave the Negroes one week to pack and leave. Not many, you see. But they’d been here as long as any white family.” He shook his head. It seemed unbearably wrong. But my father’s eyes told me his story wasn’t finished.