Private Life (24 page)

As for Alexander, sometimes his eyes were open, wide open and staring.

Sometimes his body was stiff. Dr. Bernstein checked on him twice a day, not saying

much, only asking if he was still nursing. More or less, he was still nursing.

On the morning of the eighteenth day, she unwrapped him and saw that his belly

was hugely distended. She saw, moreover, that it had been hugely distended, but that she

hadn't recognized it as hugely distended--she had only recognized it as Alexander. Alarm

and guilt surged in her, burning upward from her feet, enveloping her head, her brain, her

mind in a fever of knowledge. Her first thought was not to call Dr. Bernstein at all, but to

hide this development from him and, for some reason, call Mrs. Kimura. Even as she

thought this, Alexander started to make a noise, high-pitched and distressed, and to arch

his back. It seemed to her that he was crying for help, so she picked him up and went to

the door of the room and opened it. Naoko was in the hallway. She looked at her, and

without Margaret's saying a thing, the girl ran out the front door. Margaret closed her

door and carried Alexander over to the bed. She sat down and readied herself to nurse,

but in that short moment, the moment between her sitting down and her putting him to

the breast, he lost even that ability--Margaret felt it. It was a feeling of something

dissolving. She looked at his face. She saw that he had but one thing left, which was that

he could look back at her. She stroked the top of his head, moving the thin hairs this way

and that, feeling the smoothness of his golden skin. She held him closer, as gently as she

could. And then, in the way that you can feel with your baby but not see or sense with

anyone else larger or more distantly related, she felt the life force go out of him entirely.

1909

1911

THE LEARS MOVED AWAY--off to Hawaii and then Anchorage ("A sad day

for me," wrote Mrs. Lear, "but have you ever tasted moose? It is actually quite good

salted and dried"). The big house was taken by an older couple, Captain Pritchard and

Mrs. Pritchard, no children. Mrs. Pritchard was seventeen years older than Margaret, but

she seemed to think they were two of a kind. Though she was an agreeable, mild person,

she was afflicted with headaches and almost never emerged from her vast domicile.

Margaret had her confidantes now, and everyone on the island was friendly, but she knew

she had become the strange sort of lady that she remembered noticing as a child, the sort

of lady who was always neat and kind, whose house was quiet because there were no

children, who hosted the knitting circle and kept small treats around in case some child

might be in need of a licorice whip or a shortbread cookie.

Then, in the summer of 1911, she got a letter from Dora, who was living in

Europe. Dora's departure from St. Louis had been scandalous, but not unwelcome.

Elizabeth had written Margaret, "Robert's mother has thrown up her hands and washed

her hands at least ten thousand times, but it has had no effect at all. Now she says, 'We

shall have to BUY someone for her on the black market!'" Dora wrote:Darling,I was

sitting at a table at the restaurant at the new Goring Hotel with Ezra Pound, who is from

Idaho, can you imagine, and in walks Hearst, my BOSS, I knew him instantly, and he sits

down at the next table, and when he takes off his top hat, he puts it down on the floor

beside Ezra. Without saying a word, or even pausing in his ingestion of his sausage and

mashed potatoes, Ezra picks up his foot and puts it inside the hat. Hearst jumps up and

says, "Young man! You have your shoe in my hat!" and Ezra says, "Old man! You have

put your hat in my way!" And while they are glaring at each other, I say, "Mr. Hearst,

Miss Dora Bell,
Cosmopolitan
. May I introduce you to Mr. Pound, Ezra Pound?" At

which point, Ezra finished his sausages and exclaimed, "Pound the bell! Pound pound

pound, / As Ronald her steed did tattoo the pavement / Hatching a flock of doors, a /

barbed surreal randy will." He tossed this off in a resonant voice that caught the attention

of all the people, who then clapped, though I doubt that they understood all of the puns he

was making on our names. Then Ezra handed Mr. Hearst his top hat, and got up and

walked out. Mr. Hearst invited me to his table, and he asked what sort of poetry that was,

so I told him about Ezra and his friends. I can't say that he was impressed, except that he

said that he had been to Idaho--"Full of jokers and freaks, Miss Bell." The result of all of

this was that I have taken a position at the
San Francisco Examiner
, and I am to come

and live there.

In Europe, Dora specialized in a certain type of article, in which she happened to

find herself somewhere--walking down the road between Florence and Siena, or

exploring the Fortress of Diocletian at Split. She would fall into conversations with

people she met, and report them, as if word for word. Though she got interviews with

important politicians from time to time, mostly her subjects were not important at all.

They simply showed her how to gut a tuna or to make a pudding out of sheep stomachs or

to hide in some rocks and keep the baby quiet while a bear ambled past. Were the articles

reports or stories? Did Dora listen, or did she make it all up? Margaret didn't actually

care. When Lavinia sent her a sheaf of articles that Beatrice had culled from the

magazine, she read them avidly and felt as though she now knew the Adriatic perfectly.

Andrew was more skeptical, but he read every article from beginning to end. He declared

that he was glad Dora was coming, a breath of fresh hot Missouri air in the California

damp.

Dora arrived in Vallejo in the first-class car of the Overland Limited, stayed at the

best hotel in town. She was tiny still, but slender now rather than square. She wore a

medium-blue tiered coat over a lighter-blue skirt, and her shoes were very neat, also in

blue. After tea, they went for a stroll. She walked and talked quite confidently,

discoursing on this and that as they tramped down the street. She scanned faces and

facades and perspectives, taking everything in. Every so often, she would reach into her

bag and take out a small notebook and a pen, saying only, "One little moment, darling,"

and then write something down. When Margaret asked her what she was writing, she

said, "Goodness, I don't know. I never look into my notebook. But the habit of writing it

down keeps it in my mind. My mind is such a dustbin. Don't you remember that in St.

Louis you could hardly raise your eyes from your shoes without offending someone?

Darling, don't you enjoy California? Do you ever get tired of it? I have never seen such a

variety of humanity all in one place." Her deep, satisfied breath was practically a snort.

A week or so later, Dora asked her about Alexander. No, really, she drew

Margaret out in a practiced way. Margaret rarely if ever spoke about Alexander--every

lady in her knitting group had a tale to tell, if not of her own misfortune, then of a sister's

or a cousin's. After describing what happened as best she could, Margaret said, "Dr.

Bernstein told us about women whose children suffered from an icterus like Alexander's,

and then produced one child after another, each one sicker than the last, though how a

child could be sicker than Alexander, I don't like to think. I took that to heart. Whatever

the condition is, it doesn't seem to be relieved by the passage of time or anything a doctor

can do." She put her finger to her lips, as if keeping a secret, and then took it away, and

said, "I hated Andrew for months afterward."

Dora

nodded.

"I hated him for being disappointed in Alexander. Even though Alexander was

dying from the first moment he was born. I realize now that I was beside myself, of

course."

Dora took her hand. Margaret sighed, and then tried to be scientific. "Andrew

insisted that we test our blood, and our blood types are compatible. It's a mystery." She

went on. "I did describe Alexander's symptoms in a letter to my mother." She sipped her

tea, then said, "Of course, my mother was sympathetic, but Ben's and Lawrence's deaths

were so much worse. And my father's, of course." Margaret didn't say that she supposed

she had been cowardly not to keep at it, as Lavinia and every woman she knew had done.

She had let the scientific speculations of Dr. Bernstein and Andrew make up her mind for

her. The painful part was not so much the death of Alexander as it was that if she let

herself dwell on thoughts of Alexander, then they would be followed inescapably by

thoughts of her hand in Lawrence's, or her father bending down to say something to her.

She turned these things over in her mind, and perhaps if Lavinia had lived down the street

it would have come up one day when she found her mother in a meditative mood, and

they would have talked it out. She never had the courage to write about it in a letter,

though.

Then she said, as brightly as she could, "I thought of adopting. There was a boy I

heard of, two years old, whose mother, father, and older brother died right in town. The

boy survived all alone for three days. It was in the paper. I even went to the orphanage to

look at him. Relatives in Texas took him in. But Andrew was interested in his own

offspring, not someone else's. And he has gotten quite carried away with his book about

the moon. No time for much else, really."

Dora said, "Oh, Margaret."

Margaret changed the subject back to Dora's adventures.

What Margaret didn't tell Dora was something larger and more nebulous--that it

was Andrew himself who seemed dangerous. Not so much dangerous to her, Margaret,

but dangerous to any child they might have. When she remembered those weeks with

Alexander in the room at Mrs. Wareham's, what she remembered was not the fog of

Vallejo, but the fog of Andrew, his voice booming like a horn, his breath filling the room,

his body casting a cool shadow over the baby, his inquisitiveness a probe, draining

Alexander's own small life force. Could any infant withstand such a thing? That Andrew,

with the approval of Dr. Bernstein, stayed away from her--that he no longer read

Havelock Ellis, or aspired to a houseful of youthful geniuses--was more than fine with

her.

* * *

AT the end of the summer, Dora happened to come on the ferry, intending to stay

for the weekend and then take a horse up to Napa to explore. She put herself up at Mrs.

Wareham's--in Margaret's room. Margaret had kept the room at Mrs. Wareham's, at first

because she couldn't bear to give it up, and later because it gave them access to Vallejo

when they didn't want to take the trouble to get the ferry to the island. She kept

Alexander's cradle there until one of the ladies in her knitting circle asked if she could

give it to her daughter for her grandson, and Margaret saw that she was right, and kind, in

her intentions. As a result of her keeping the room, and using it, Mrs. Wareham had

become her good friend. The two of them spent many evenings knitting and discussing,

and lamenting, the wild habits of Mrs. Wareham's son, Angus. Andrew was as good with

Angus as he had been with the Lear boys--since Andrew was up most nights, and was tall

and strong, he didn't mind rousting Angus out of the bad neighborhoods, carting him

home drunk, and putting him to bed without disturbing Mrs. Wareham. And it gave him

the opportunity to exercise his curiosity about something other than the universe--he

declared to Margaret that he could have mapped Vallejo if there were a call for that sort

of thing. Angus had finally, in the last year, gone into the navy. He was now a sailor over

at the island, about to embark upon his first mission, to the Bay of Fundy.

Dora stayed that night with Mrs. Wareham. By the next morning, when Margaret

arrived for breakfast, the two women had settled it between them that Margaret's room

was to pass to Dora. Dora fancied the idea of a retreat, not so much because she wished to

rusticate herself and take a rest, as because she wished to have yet another place to

explore and another group of friends.

While Mrs. Wareham's daughter, Cassandra, and Naoko served breakfast to the