Sins and Needles (29 page)

Betsy said, “Mrs. McConnell, we went out to the Big Island this morning.”

Susan nodded. “I thought that's where you'd go,” she said to her daughter.

“Jan isn't sure, but I think we managed to find the treasure stitched on that map she showed you.”

All the color drained from Susan's face, and she stared at the black bundle as if afraid it might grow teeth and bite her. But she managed a normal voice as she asked, “And what was the treasure?”

“This,” said Betsy, beginning to pull at the tape.

“A doll, it's just a doll!” said Jan hurriedly, watching her mother's face. “A really old one, with a wax head, wrapped in a flannel blanket. Isn't that crazy?”

Susan looked at her daughter, astonished, and fainted, sliding out of the cream chair onto the pastel green carpet.

Jan was immediately by her side. “Here, now, what's wrong?” she said, pulling at her mother's legs to get her flat on the floor. Betsy handed her a crewel pillow from the couch, and Jan put it under her mother's feet. She took her mother's pulse, then chafed her hand gently. “Come on, darling, come on,” she crooned. “Wake up. You're all right. Everything's all right.”

“Does she need a blanket or something?” asked Betsy.

“No, look, she's opening her eyes now.”

Susan's eyelids fluttered, and she made a soft exclamation. “What—what happened? Why am I on the floor?” The second question was asked more forcefully, and Jan smiled.

“You fainted, that's all. You're all right. You're going to be fine.”

“Why on earth—? Oh.” Memory returned, and color flushed into Susan's face. She looked around, saw Betsy, then looked at her daughter again. “Is what you told me true?”

“Yes, we found a wooden box nailed shut, and when we opened it, there was a doll inside, wrapped in a flannel blanket. It was under the muck and water of a marsh, so everything was wet and discolored. The blanket might once have been blue, but it was hard to tell.”

“Where did you go looking for it?” asked Susan, now more in command of her senses. She rose to a sitting position, bending her knees, leaning her back against the chair.

“Right where it said to on the map,” said Susan. “The marsh had expanded, and it took over most of the road.”

Betsy, who had put the bundle aside, lifted it back onto her lap and began again to pull at the strips of tape. She said, “We found a rock first, shaped like a heart—” She paused when Susan gave a little exclamation, but Susan waved at her to continue. “It was under water. We found it by stepping on it. Jason pried it out of the side of the bank, and a couple of feet down under it we found the box.”

Susan fell silent for a little while, her face gone sad. Then, “Help me up,” she ordered her daughter, and they had an awkward little struggle until she was on her feet. Jan sat her on the easy chair.

“May I get you something to drink?” she asked.

“Yes, please. I think there's a bottle of sherry in the cabinet over there. Just a drop or two.”

Jan hurried over to the low cabinet, and soon the clink of bottle on glass was heard.

Susan looked at Betsy and said, “You said you have the doll with you?”

“Yes, would you like to see it?”

Susan stared at the bundle which now, with strips of duct tape pulled off, was beginning to unwrap itself. “All right. Wait, let me have my drink first. A wax head, you said?”

“Yes, a wax head and a kid leather body.”

Susan said, “I've seen wax-headed dolls in antique stores. They look like miniature adults in those fancy old dresses.”

Susan came to hand her mother a tiny cut-glass goblet half full of a red brown liquid. “I've seen them on
Antiques Roadshow
. It was the French who made the beautiful adult dolls. But I've also seen ones made in Germany. They're called ‘character dolls' and were made in the early 1900s. Some were children, some even were babies.”

Susan immediately swallowed half the liquid, then waved her hand in front of her face, mouth open. “I guess I needed that, but it's almost as bad as medicine,” she said. She drank the rest, then handed the glass back to her daughter. “Thank you, dear,” she said.

“More?” asked Jan.

“No, that's enough. Now I think I'm ready to see this doll you found.” She sounded much more like herself, though the sherry had raised two bright spots of pink on her cheeks, and the rest of her complexion was still very pale.

Betsy pulled the last strip of tape off and unwound the bag. She let the bag drape over her lap, as the blanket enclosing the doll was still wet, if no longer dripping. The blanket was a dirty gray color.

Susan leaned forward as Betsy gently pulled it down to expose the gray-brown head.

Time had also done its work on the face. Probably once sweet-looking, now it was slightly distorted, the closed mouth pulled a little to one side, and one eye squinched almost closed. Susan put her hands over her mouth and made a tiny moan. Jan sat on the arm of the chair and put an arm around her mother. “Awful, isn't it?” she said, trying for a light tone. “We thought it was a real baby when we saw it. We even called the police. Jason said he was never so embarrassed in his life when we saw it was just a doll. The policeman had to try really hard not to laugh—though when he first saw it, he thought it was real, too, I noticed. I think he was laughing at himself, not us.”

Susan slipped off the chair and came to kneel beside Betsy. Very, very gingerly she touched the tiny face. “Just a doll. It looked so real.” She pressed her lips shut and sat back on her heels.

Betsy said, “I have some truly bad news.”

“What?” asked Susan blankly.

“Something has happened to Lucille Jones.”

“What?” Susan asked, with no hint she might know what it was.

“Lucille has been shot. She's in critical condition at the Hennepin County Medical Center.”

“Shot—who on earth would do a thing like that?”

“The police are hoping she'll be able to wake up and tell them,” said Betsy. Again, there was no sign of worry on Susan's face that Lucille might accuse Susan of the deed. “She really is your daughter, you know.”

“Who is?”

“Lucille.”

“No, I—” Susan stopped short, her mouth pursed to continue, but without any sound coming forth.

“That's right. You thought you buried your baby on the Big Island. Susan, please, tell us how that came about.”

S
USAN
sighed and leaned back in her chair. “It's the old, sad story, of course. I went to a New Year's Eve party with this upstanding young man. We'd known each other for nearly a year, since I turned fifteen. He was not quite two years older than I, which means a lot when you're just fifteen. He was very sweet, and my mother didn't like him, which helped a lot.”

She smiled, and continued, “The party was at a friend's house, and he didn't tell us his parents wouldn't be home. And somebody brought a keg of beer. I had never had a drink before in my life, other than the one sip of wine at Thanksgiving my father permitted me after I turned thirteen, and I don't think David had, either, though he pretended he had. We didn't get falling-down drunk—which might have saved us, now I think about it. We just got drunk enough to lose our inhibitions, and six weeks later, I told my mother what had happened and why I suspected it wasn't a bad piece of fish the night before that had me throwing up that morning.

“This was 1959. The country was on the verge of social change but hadn't crossed the threshold, at least not in St. Paul. Mother was furious, at me and at David. Father wanted a shotgun wedding, but Mother's dislike of David had only deepened over this mess. She won, and Mother told David and his family to stay away. I wasn't told about this, and I thought he'd abandoned me. I was only sixteen. Mother thought she was doing what was right. She wanted me to be at the very least a nurse, perhaps even a doctor. I wanted it, too—but I was carrying a baby, and that was a potentially ruinous condition, not just for me, but the whole family. An abortion was out of the question. I don't think it even occurred to any of us. But reputation meant a great deal back then, and a doctor could lose patients if it were known his daughter had a baby out of wedlock. And of course, if I kept the baby, I could not get into medical school.

“So we went to the old solution: As soon as I started to show, I was shipped off to Aunt Edyth—we were living in St. Paul at the time, and while there was some worry that Orono wasn't far enough away, there was no place else except a home for unwed mothers, and Mother absolutely didn't want me in one of
those places
—you know, where the young women were
those kind
of people. So our friends were told that Aunt Edyth had fallen and injured her back and was having trouble getting around, so I was going to spend the summer with her.

“Aunt Edyth was a peculiar woman all her life. She took me in and was kindness walking—except when I'd do something foolish or incorrectly, and she'd be so angry, it would set her off on a tirade. She'd berate me for a promiscuous fool and ask how I could be such a ninny as to believe love talk from a man. She was kind of a moody person, I decided. But now, looking back at the incredibly ignorant and opinionated idiot I was, I wonder if she wasn't justified in her disappointment in me. Either that, or she was suffering from cabin fever at least as bad as mine.”

Susan chuckled, looking up at the ceiling but seeing scenes from more than fifty years ago. “She must have hated having to pretend all summer that she was housebound with a bad back—she sure loved getting out and going places! She loved to ride that motorcycle on fine afternoons, and she loved to break speed limits in her automobile. She never kept a car more than two years, and she insisted on the biggest engine they came with. But of course that summer—” Her smile abruptly vanished. “God, I hated being a disappointment to her. She was so proud of me, of my abilities in school. She said it was like seeing herself in a better time, with more opportunities for women than she had. I loved her so much…” A tear formed and fell, then another, but she lifted her chin and blinked to stop them.

“She had told me that in my ninth month, she'd call one of those homes, and I'd go there the last couple of weeks and have the baby and sign the papers to give it up. At first, I was all right with that, but as my tummy filled and the baby kicked and moved, I started to fall in love with it. I asked her about keeping it, and she said no, positively no. I said she was a rebel, maybe I could be another kind of rebel, the kind that keeps her babies, even without a husband. That's when I found out that in certain respects she was extremely old-fashioned. She wouldn't hear such nonsense. My parents had high expectations of me, expectations that would be destroyed if I came home with a baby and no husband. What would people think? Alice and John would be held up to ridicule, trying to lie to the neighborhood about where I'd been. How could I think of doing such a wicked thing to them—and destroying my own future in the process?

“But I still thought about it. I couldn't let go of the notion that it could be worked out somehow, and I think she knew it, though we didn't talk about it anymore.

“And then, eight weeks from my due date, I got this terrific pain. My water broke, and I felt such pain as never in my life before. Aunt Edyth got me up to bed and after about twenty minutes of screaming, I had the baby. She wrapped it in a towel and took it out of the room. It didn't cry. I remember being very worried about that, because I knew newborns were supposed to cry right away.

“Aunt Edyth came back a few minutes later to see how I was doing, and I asked her about the baby, and she said she wasn't sure, but it was resting. I said I wanted to see it, and she said, ‘In a little while.' She brought clean towels and made me comfortable, gave me something to drink, and went away again. And I fell asleep. I couldn't believe it. Even while I was falling asleep, I remember thinking how silly it was—I was frantic about the baby and I was still in a lot of pain, and I was falling asleep.”

Jan and Betsy exchanged significant looks.

Susan, oblivious, continued, “When I woke up, it was dark out, and she was sitting beside me. She talked so softly and looked so comforting. She was in her nightgown, and her hair was in her long nighttime braid. And she told me the baby was dead. It was a boy, she said, but not completely formed, and it never took a breath.

“I thought I would never stop crying.” She wiped her eyes with the fingers of both hands. “But I did when she said we had to figure out right away what we were going to do.

“We hadn't told anybody about the baby, of course, so no one would come looking for it. On the other hand, it wasn't a dead puppy, so I was totally against burying it on the grounds like one, which was her first suggestion. I wanted to look at him, hold it in my arms just once, but she said it was ‘funny looking' and it would disturb me to see it. We talked some more, and I guess she was the one who remarked that the Big Island used to have many Indian mounds marking Indian graves, and that it was considered sacred ground even to the present time by the Indians. And we worked ourselves into deciding it would be a fine and natural burial place for the baby.

“She'd gotten an antique vase from an auction house a few days before, and she said we could use the walnut storage chest it came in. She wrapped the little body in a soft blue flannel baby blanket, and I named him David after the father. I got just a little glimpse of the face—it was such a wee, little thing, and I remember it had no eyelashes—as she put it into the box and took it downstairs. She nailed the top down…” Susan had to stop for a few moments.

“I have never, ever forgotten the sound of those nails being driven in. She never hesitated, just drove them in, one after the other, as if she were building a table or a gate…” Susan did stop then, to weep, and Jan moved to sit on one arm of the chair again and wrap her arms around her mother.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, darling Mother, how awful, how awful,” she murmured. She began to stroke her mother's hair, as if she were a cat, repeating the gesture over and over while she murmured words of comfort.

“Oh, but this is silly. It was such a long time ago!” cried Susan, striving to stop crying. Then, suddenly, she grew very still. After a few moments, her still-streaming eyes came up to meet Betsy's. “And now you have the
audacity
to come here and tell me I did not lose that baby?” she asked in a low voice. “You're telling me Aunt Edyth
lied
to me?”

“Yes,” said Betsy striving for a calm tone. Her own emotions were on a rave; she couldn't decide which was stronger—pity for Susan or anger at Edyth. “Where did you get the stone?”

Susan seemed about to refuse to answer, but finally said, still in that low voice, “It was something I'd found when I was eleven, part of a crazy-paving walk. Aunt Edyth had taken up the stones and piled them against the fence. The one I found had a kind of pink color to it, and it was shaped almost like a heart. I got a hammer and very carefully chipped away at it until it really did resemble a heart. I put it in the shed out back, thinking the next time we buried an animal, I would use it to mark the spot. I never did, but now I remembered it and insisted we bring it along.

“Aunt Edyth wanted me to stay behind, but I was absolutely positive I had to see where he was buried. She was so worried about that, sure I would get sick and die, and how would she explain what happened? But I said I didn't care if I died, I was coming.

“It was late July when we took the
Edali
out, a Thursday night—well, Friday morning, really. We went around the Big Island and found a place where the land ran down low into the water, and there was just this one cabin up a ways, with no lights showing.

“Aunt Edyth had a big battery flashlight and set it on the shore so she could see what she was doing, then got me ashore and made me sit beside it while she unloaded the spade, the coffin and the stone. There was a road along the shore then, just a lane, really, and I got up and walked a little way up it and saw three bridal wreath bushes in a row that I liked, though of course they were all through blooming by then, and I said that was the place. She took off the top layer of grass and weeds in front of the bushes and dug the grave.” Susan paused.

“I think she was angry. I remember her pushing the spade in deep with her foot; and the way her head bent and arms moved said
angry
,
angry
. I sat on the ground and tried not to cry, because she scared me, and because she was taking care of me, and because of the enormity of what we were doing.

“I think she dug until she wasn't angry anymore. She put the coffin in. There was a little water in the bottom, it made a splash, and I said the Lord's Prayer and prayed for David's soul to go to heaven and wait for me, then we covered it up. She already said she wouldn't let me put the heart on top, for fear someone would see it and realize that something was buried under it, so I put the heart down when the hole was nearly full, and she finished and put the sod back and went and got the bait bucket and filled it a bunch of times to water it well. I was worried about that, but it rained the next afternoon, so I guess no one came along the lane before the rain and noticed that the ground was soaked in that one place.

“We came back home, and she put me to bed and made me stay there for seven days. When she wasn't looking, I stitched the map, and later I put it inside the pillow I'd been working on while I was waiting for David to be born. When I was ready to go home, we couldn't find the pillow.” Susan fell silent then.

After nearly a minute, Jan said, “Is it possible that when Aunt Edyth brought you something to drink after the birth, there was something in it to make you fall asleep; and that while you slept, she took your baby to St. Paul, to the children's hospital there, and left it?”

“Why the children's hospital in St. Paul?”

“Because that's where Lucille was left.”

Betsy asked, “What did you tell your parents?”

“I told them—and David—that the baby was a boy and had been given up for adoption.”

Another silence. Then Susan asked, “You
promise
you found the box under a stone heart and this is the doll that was in that box?”

“Absolutely,” said Jan. “The police officer said the tannin in the swamp water preserved it, like those ‘bog bodies' they keep finding in England and the Scandinavian countries. Did you ever see a doll with a wax head in Aunt Edyth's house?”

Susan thought. “No. But that doesn't meant it wasn't there. The wax-headed dolls in the antique shop were very expensive—and Aunt Edyth was a collector with a fondness for expensive things. She might not have shown it to me for fear I'd play with it and damage it. Those wax faces must be fragile.” She thought a bit longer, then said, “Remember that doll-size silk christening gown we found?”

“Yes,” said Jan with a nod. “I am pretty sure that gown would fit this doll.”

Susan heaved a lengthy sigh. “Why did she do that to me?” she asked.

“Because you were talking about keeping the baby,” said Betsy. “She wanted to protect you and your parents from the consequences of your doing that.”

“Yes, that would make sense to her. So, you believe this woman from Texas, Lucille Jones, really is my daughter, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am, I do.”

“But Aunt Edyth told me it was a boy.”

“Because if something went wrong and you came to suspect your baby hadn't died and went looking for it, you'd be looking for a boy infant, not a girl.”