Some Luck (46 page)

Because of the war, Frank’s speaking German was pretty good, but he had to work hard at reading the papers. For a while, his main job was just to sort them and box them—he at least knew when one set of papers ended and another set began. Even though others had translated enough to be taken aback, maybe amazed at what they found, there were vast quantities still to go through. American companies of all kinds were waiting for the results; the promise was that everything found would be published and go straight into the public domain. Each afternoon, when Frank left the giant building, formerly
an airplane hangar, he saw rows of men who had read the weekly bibliography of patents and procedures, standing in line to buy the documents or to order the ones that hadn’t been printed yet.

Otherwise, Dayton was not that different from Usherton, and Frank was restless there. As a result, he went back and forth to Washington (in his new car, a Studebaker Champion) about once a month—he could get there in six or seven hours if he drove at night. Arthur and Lillian amused him, Arthur because he was genuinely amusing and Lillian because she was so obviously enjoying both Arthur and Timmy. Timmy, said Rosanna and even Walter (who had come in September), looked exactly like Frank himself. Sometimes, Frank squatted down in front of the playpen, watched Timmy, and tried to make something out about him—what he remembered most clearly from his own childhood was that lattice of ropes underneath Walter and Rosanna’s bed, that feeling of dim enclosure that was not unlike the safety of a foxhole, and was a relief from the space everywhere on the farm—yes, outside, but also out the windows and through the doors. He could lie under the bed, staring at the woven ropes and the ticking of the mattress and relax. For some reason, he had not been allowed to do it very often—he couldn’t remember why. The rest of his childhood was don’t touch that and get down from there and watch out for the back end of that cow and don’t let Jake step on your foot and be careful of the ladder and there’s a trapdoor there and stay back from the planter and don’t go near that by yourself and if you get caught in a thunderstorm, lie flat in a ditch and, yes, in a high wind, the outhouse could fall over, and careful of the thorns on the Osage-orange hedge. Only under the bed had he taken deep, quiet breaths and felt safe. He held out his forefingers to Timmy, and Timmy grabbed them and pulled himself upward, and then, when he was sitting, and balancing himself against Frank’s fingers, he started crowing and laughing.

1947

W
HEN LILLIAN WROTE TO
Rosanna and told her she was pregnant again, Rosanna wrote back and told her that it was because she was bottle feeding rather than nursing, which surprised Lillian a little bit. When they’d handed her the bottle in the hospital and showed her how to give little Timmy his formula, they hadn’t mentioned that. Nor did they tell her that you had to add sugar to the formula in order to make sure his BMs were the right consistency. Lillian didn’t even mention this to Rosanna, but one of the best things about rearing Timmy in an apartment rather than on a farm was that she could take care of him just the way she wished—she sterilized the eight bottles she would need for the day the night before, and left them in the enclosed sterilizer on the gas stove overnight. Then, in the morning, she measured the formula milk, added the sugar to the boiled and cooled water, mixed the water with the milk, and divided the total amount into eight equal parts, which she poured into the sterilized bottles. Just the idea of feeding a baby with the sort of water they’d had from the well on the farm, even in good times, gave Lillian the willies. And where would Rosanna have gotten evaporated, processed milk? Yes, Lillian herself had drunk milk from their cows (with the cream skimmed for butter, of course), but that she had survived was probably more a testament to luck than to anything else. And one hadn’t survived—Mary Elizabeth. Maybe
Lillian had never known how she died; she certainly didn’t remember now, and she didn’t dare ask her mother. Possibly, she could ask Frank when he came again. These were the sorts of thoughts that occupied her while she was making Timmy’s formula for the day. And, of course, now there was pablum and applesauce and zwieback—he was a good eater. He no longer took a morning nap, but he went down fine in the afternoon, at exactly two, just like the book said, and at seven-thirty for the night, which meant that he was up by five, an hour before he was supposed to get up, according to the book. When she wrote and asked Rosanna about their sleeping schedules, Rosanna said, “Oh, goodness me, down up down up. The only one I remember is Claire, who slept like a rock in the front room. And you, of course. You were perfect. I don’t remember a thing before you. There was one time when I put Henry down and he was out the back door after something before I got there. I think he was almost to the barn before I caught him.”

Henry was the perfect one now, handsome, neat, a good student, destined never to make trouble. He would be fifteen this year, and already too good for Iowa State. Rosanna thought sure he would go to the University of Iowa and become a doctor.

Every morning, Lillian bundled Timmy into his snowsuit and carried him down the stairs. They had applied for another apartment, on the first floor, but so far it hadn’t been vacated. The baby carriage was inside the front door, in the hallway, and Arthur had chained it with a padlock to the banister. It embarrassed Lillian to be seen unlocking the padlock, and then it was rather difficult to get it down the two steps to the walk. The walk sloped just enough so that if she did not hold on to the handle of the baby carriage every second, it would start to roll, and she could easily imagine it gaining speed, bumping down the next two steps to the sidewalk, and rushing into the street (which was rather a busy one—how had she and Arthur not seen all of these dangers when they signed their lease?). But, according to the book, you had to go out—the baby had to have fresh air every day, even in the rain or snow, which was why the baby carriage had a hood. Once she was out, mostly she walked around the streets, or over to the Giant supermarket, where she looked at the rows of baby food and tried to decide which to try next. One particularly discomfiting thing that Rosanna told her was that she herself, Lillian,
had loved liver as a baby, calves’ liver that Rosanna rolled in seasoned flour and fried in butter until it was just done through. “No one else liked it, but you couldn’t get enough.” Lillian would never feed Timmy such a thing.

Lunch was baby chicken with peas, or baby turkey with carrots, and a little tapioca for dessert, and then the story and the nap. Usually, Lillian went down, too, but she kept the doors open so she could see the crib, and she taught herself to sleep facing it. Timmy’s door was right by the bathroom door, and though he couldn’t get out of his crib, and the bathroom door was closed, and the toilet lid was down, what would keep him, really, from waking up, heading for the bathroom, and plunging headfirst into the toilet?

Arthur didn’t have these sorts of fears. Arthur had gotten a new job, or, rather, the same job at a new office, and what the name of that office was had gone in her one ear and out the other. Some initials. The best thing about Arthur was that he still ran up the stairs at six and threw open the door, and gave her a great hug, but then he immediately took Timmy in his arms and danced him around, saying, “Who is this kid? Is he that same kid who was here last night? Don’t believe it!” Arthur was a tickler and a tosser, and Timmy seemed to love both being laid on his back on the couch and tickled until he was burbling with laughter, and being tossed up and caught like a sack of flour. And he was like a sack of flour, which was a delicate thing. With Arthur tossing, no sack of flour would ever tear and spill, and no baby would ever get hurt.

After Timmy was born, Lillian had caught Arthur crying, and not just one time. Finally, he took her hand and said, “I didn’t realize how worried I was, or how dumbfounded I would be. I thought when Laura was born dead that I had just accepted it, but I guess I hadn’t.” Lillian tried not to think that she loved Arthur for his misfortune, but it did seem to add a deeper color to her love, and it made him a very attentive father. She knew other women with babies now, and their husbands seemed a little put off or frightened by their children, but Arthur was eager for more—Irish twins! He’d had friends in school who were Irish twins—born within a year of one another, so close together that they got put in the same grade. These two were tremendous friends, and now that they were grown up and home from the war, they were in the car business together in Roanoke.

Timmy was active. What was he, exactly eight months today. Lillian had taped folded washcloths over the corners of the coffee table with masking tape, which wasn’t supposed to leave marks, and Timmy was just sitting there, pulling himself to his feet and letting himself sit, and pulling himself up, and laughing. She wanted him to go down for his nap, but he was so excited that she didn’t think he would do it. It made her a little anxious, but she decided to get out her Brownie camera and take some pictures to send to Rosanna. That was another thing—there was only one picture from their childhoods, one taken by Mrs. Frederick (poor thing) when Lillian was nine and Henry was three. None of Frank or Joe or even Claire, only one of Walter and Rosanna, on the day they were married. Lillian was deep into her first scrapbook already, with pages of pictures of Timmy, and more than a few of herself and Arthur taken here and there around town (though Arthur didn’t like to be photographed, and in most of his, his hat was pulled down). He looked very sharp.

Lillian snapped six or eight pictures, making sure to get the sun behind her, and then set down the camera and picked up Timmy and kissed him all over. How another child was going to fit into their world, she could not imagine.

MAMA TOOK CLAIRE
to the optometrist in Usherton because she had failed a test. It wasn’t a regular test, it was one where the kids had to go into the lunchroom, with all the shades down, and read from a lit-up square on the lunchroom wall, which was normally painted pale blue. There were letters in the square, big to small, and also things sitting up and lying down, and you had to say which direction they were pointing. It didn’t take very long. Claire could read the two biggest lines of letters, but nothing below that without leaning forward and squinting. Mama was annoyed, because no one had ever needed glasses before in their family. “As far as we know,” said Papa.

“Your family, maybe, but even Opa only needed reading glasses after he was sixty-five.”

Claire wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to do at the optometrist’s. There were things that she looked through and things that she looked at—mostly letters and figures, some of them filled in and some of them empty. The optometrist kept asking her questions, and
after a while she was so bored that she just said anything that came into her head, or she tried looking at the things with one eye closed or squinting or something, which changed the way they looked. But she behaved herself. She always behaved herself. She did not fidget, and she spoke only when spoken to, and she kept her fingernails out of her mouth and also her hair. At school sometimes, she found the end of her left pigtail in her mouth, but only when the teacher was so boring that she made Claire forget what she was doing and where she was. Finally, while the optometrist was adjusting yet another machine, Claire put her head down on the table and dozed off. When she woke up, Mama was right there. She said, “What in the world is going on?”

“Well, she needs glasses, but I can’t figure out …”

“Claire, are you giving Dr. Hicks a hard time?”

Claire shook her head.

She did, however, get glasses. Dr. Hicks had lots of styles. Claire sat in front of a mirror, and Dr. Hicks hooked them over her ears one temple at a time. He said, “Well, she has a round face, and so …”

“I don’t think of her face as round. More heart-shaped,” said Mama.

“Well, you see, though, this rounder frame is a bit more flattering. For the heart-shaped face, we like a wider frame. Perhaps if she wore her hair down rather than in pigtails.”

Mama ignored this. “I think she looks fine in the rounder frame. But which is the sturdiest one? These are thirty dollars?”

“Yes, and that includes the frame, but for ten dollars more, I can give you a new type of lens that is really plastic. Much less easily broken.”

“I’m sure Claire will be very careful with them.”

In the end, they bought the new kind. Every morning, every afternoon after school, and every night before bed, Mama asked her where her glasses were if she was not wearing them. Claire got to be quite jumpy—when Mama used a certain tone, her hand would go straight to her face, not because she didn’t know whether or not she had them on, but because she didn’t know where they were. Didn’t she care about being able to see?

Yes, she did, and there actually was quite a difference, but the glasses were a big responsibility. It was easier to sit in the first row and lean toward the blackboard and squint than it was to keep track
of the darn things. And then, every time she didn’t know where they were, it started an argument between Mama and Papa. Mama would say, “Is this child ever going to learn how to take care of her things?” and Papa would say, “She does fine. The problem is that you only have one to fuss over. Not enough chaos for you.”