When the Morning Glory Blooms (8 page)

Ivy wiggled her toes inside her shoes. She arched her back. What would it be like in a few months when the baby weighed more than a whisper? The only good thing about heading home to that stuffy, friendless apartment at the end of the day was the prospect of getting out of her uniform and shoes. She’d punched out already but poked her head into room 117 one last time.

“Anything else I can do for you before I leave, Anna?”

“I can’t remember his name.”

“Whose?”

“The pig. What was Ham’s real name? I’m losing the pieces.”

“It’ll come to you. If you’re like me, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and
Eureka!
Don’t worry yourself about it.”

“I’m losing the pieces of my story, Ivy.” The older woman looked up, as if tilting her head back would keep the threatening tears from spilling.

“It happens to the best of us, I guess.”

Anna leveled her watery gaze at Ivy. “But I want them to know.”

“Who?”

“My girls. I want them to know how it turned out.”

“Your daughters? But your chart says—”

“A hundred and twenty-seven of them.”

“Miss Anna  . . .” Ivy fought to remove the hint of condescension from her voice. “I just read a magazine article about a woman who had the most children born to her of any woman on earth. From Eastern Europe, I believe. Sixty-nine. That’s the record.”

“Well, I had a hundred and twenty-seven of them.” Anna’s gnarled hand reached to rub the spot on her cheekbone where the map of Africa age spot rested. “And that must make close to four or five hundred grandchildren by now.”

“Now, Anna  . . .”

“Maybe more. Oh, how rude of me not to ask. How are your morning glories, dear?”

“My morning glories? I don’t have any flowers outside my apartment.”

“You call it morning
sickness
, I’m sure.”

Ivy’s knees lost their mooring pegs. At least half her previous height melted into her white nursing shoes.

“What?”

“Is it getting better now? Usually does. Not for all women, but most.”

“Anna, I  . . .  I don’t know what you mean.”

“Didn’t you tell me you were expecting? Oh, maybe not. I guess I just knew. Or maybe the Lord told me.”

“How could you know?” Ivy retraced her conversation with every living soul at the home. No, she hadn’t breathed a word. “I mean  . . .”

“Experience. I can usually read it in the eyes. But that green pallor to your skin these past weeks gave it away. Funny you haven’t mentioned it to me. I’m sure you have your reasons. Is your young man excited?”

“My  . . .  my husband? Yes. Of course.”

Anna grew a sympathetic pout-spout on her lower lip. “Too bad he’s got to be so far away at a time like this.”

“How did you know that?”

“The letters.”

Ivy sat down hard on the idle steam register along the wall. “I haven’t shared his letters with you.”

“I see their outline through the pocket of your uniform. Red and blue border. Must be airmail. Really far away?”

“Korea.”

“Oh, child.”

“His name is Drew.”

“Drew Carrington. A stately name. Finding a fitting first name for your baby will be a challenge, won’t it?”

“I don’t know how you—” Was the room spinning? Ivy’s mind whirled. She knew the day would come. Someone had to be the first to know. But this dear, almost ninety-year-old woman with “less than a full complement” of sensibility left to her? If
she
figured it out, how long before others knew? Or did they already? Had the break room gossip started without her?

“His name is Lambert. Drew Lambert. I  . . .  I kept my own name when we  . . .  married.”

“Whoever heard of such a thing? I don’t know. Young people today. Not you, of course, Ivy. You’re one of the reasons I still have hope. Which brings me back to Ham.”

“Your pig?” Any subject was safer than the one with which they were toying. “Yes, tell me about your pig, Anna.”

“Actually, he belonged to Puff.”

“Your husband?”

“Oh, mercy, no! Now, what did Puff call that pig? Ivy, I’m losing the pieces!”

What am I getting myself into? Just walk out the door, Ivy. You’ve put in your time. Spare yourself the grief. You’ve got larger concerns than an old lady missing a piece of her memory puzzle. Maybe Jill’s got the right attitude
.

No. No, she doesn’t
.

“Tell me more about him, Anna. The name might come to you.”

Anna slapped her hands together in a single burst of misshapen applause. “Where do I start?”

“When did you first see the pig?”

“Soon after Puff moved in.”

“Puff  . . .  lived with you?”

“Yes. Well, not in the way you might be thinking. He helped me run the place.”

“The place?”

“Morning Glory.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”

“Do you think it would help if you jotted a few things down? If my hands weren’t so crippled with the
ar-thur-itis
I’d write this myself. I need to tell my girls how it all turned out.”

“Your daughters.”

“Not really.”

“Now, Anna  . . .”

Anna folded her disfigured hands and rested them on her lap. “I should start at the beginning.”

6

Anna—1890s

Seems you’re flirting with foolishness, if you ask me,” he said, flicking cigar ashes over the side of the carriage and onto the blessedly damp, ash-snuffing lane.

Flirting was far from my mind. And I wasn’t asking.

His speech gurgled. The man was drowning in his own spit!

He cleared his throat with a grinding sound. “Sure you ain’t bit off more than you can chew? What’re you planning to do with it? You can’t be thinking too ambitious, considering the shape it’s in.”

People of various ilks and motives have wondered whatever possessed me to make what I did of the house. Aunt Phoebe’s lawyer—a greasy man with extra chins and a deficit of manners—was among the first.

On the carriage ride from his office in Westbrook the day I took possession, he peppered me with questions about my intentions, as if he felt obligated to protect me from a nefarious suitor, as if I were proposing marriage to the structure. In a way, I suppose I was.

My hesitance to give clear answers must have frustrated him. His brow furrowed and he breathed sausage-scented sighs. Unconcerned whether or not he understood me, I
clutched my thoughts close to my heart. His constant probing was like a squeaky pump handle. For all his flailing efforts, he was rewarded with no more than a dribble of information from me.

Tenacity sometimes steps over the line into stubbornness, but I won’t apologize for that. It got me through more than one pickle.

His clothes smelled of yesterday’s bullhead dinner and cheap homemade cigars. As we rode side by side in the carriage, I worked my shawl up around my shoulders, frail protection that it was against everything offensive about him. Being polite is not often a struggle for me. This day it was a canyon crossing  . . .  barefoot  . . .  with a fifty-pound pack on my back.

“You sure you thunk this through?” he asked as he urged the horse across the bridge at the entrance to Aunt Phoebe’s property. Poor grammar seemed a good fit for his demeanor, a mismatch for his profession.

“I’ve given it a great deal of thought, Mr. Rawlins.”

He grunted, then spit over the side of the carriage. We rode in blessed silence the last few hundred yards.

“You ain’t but, what, twenty? Big place for a little thing like you,” he said, turning the key in the padlock on the ten-foot, double front doors.

A little thing? Did he think I’d consider that endearing?
“It suited my aunt, and she was no taller than I, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I didn’t mean because you’re short. Just  . . .  well  . . .  being alone.”

“As was Aunt Phoebe a good portion of her life.”

Our footsteps left footprints in the dust on the hardwood floors. A bit of plaster from somewhere high on the foyer wall crunched underfoot. The air inside smelled like a damp cellar.

“Lots of upkeep in a place like this.” He rattled the loose newel post on the banister in the entry, as if punctuating his point.

“I’m not afraid of hard work.”

“That may be all you have going for you.” I’m sure those were his words, though he’d turned his back to me and lowered his voice. “Don’t suppose you need a tour.”

“No tour. Just the keys, please.” I refused to drop my outstretched hand, determined not to be the first to flinch. “Mr. Rawlins?”

“I must remind you that the bank’d be more than happy to relieve you of this albatross.”

“If you would be so kind as to help unload my trunks from the carriage, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I don’t think you’ve taken into consideration all this here house is going to require in the way of maintenance and—”

“I will save you the energy of delivering the remainder of your speech. Be assured I will inform Mr. Blakemore at the bank that you did all you could to persuade me. You discharged your duty as instructed. But I was and ever will be immovable on this subject. I’m keeping the house.”

The veins at his temples beat frustration’s pulse. He did not bear defeat well, which showed in his rough handling of my trunks and the fact that he left them on the porch. I was glad to be rid of him and his greasy odor, even if it did mean wrestling the beasts across the threshold myself.

After the dust of his departure settled, I walked back out through the front door and down the steps, turned, and approached on my own, with no irritation at my elbow. I reentered the house as I’d wanted to, with a sense of awe rather than restrained anger.

Aunt Phoebe’s home was now mine. It came to me along with her walnut rocker, her silver tea set, and six hand-painted
porcelain cups and saucers—the extent of her earthly possessions she felt worth mentioning in her will. The truth of the matter is she outlived her husband and his modest savings. Medical expenses whittled away at her worldly goods until, at the time of her death, her bank account and her house were as empty as her spiritless body.

I hadn’t expected to inherit the house. I suppose that was naive of me. She had no other living relatives. When she died, I, also, was left with no one to call mine.

The key yet in my hand, I surveyed my new home. Empty, drafty, colorless rooms. All of them. As awkward in their emptiness as a missing front tooth on an otherwise distinguished politician’s wife.

A stubborn hint of elegance remained in the architecture. Lofty ceilings. Ornate carved mantels and woodwork. A staircase that swept like a swan’s neck to the second floor. The house whispered, “You should have seen me in my youth.”

Now, every inch was bare and unadorned, unless one could count the layers of dust and the crisscrossed trails of rodent droppings. On that first encounter, my footsteps echoed hollowly as I walked the barrenness of the once grand Federal-style home. My inheritance? Or my liability?

I had only a handful of items to my name. Everything else had been consumed by debts, which I also had inherited. I was as unprepared to furnish a house as was an immigrant whose life savings covered the expense of the ocean crossing but not a penny more. I stood with my feet on foreign soil but having no resources with which to move inland away from the shore.

The cramped room at Mrs. Hazelton’s boardinghouse took what little I earned but gave me the gift of closeness to the sanitarium where Aunt Phoebe’s days drained to the dregs. She needed companionship, a kind face in the midst of a cruel disease. And I needed to be near her.

So now, these years later, I stood dumbstruck and dreamless in her home. As if chiding a petulant child, I asked the barren house, “What am I going to do with you?”

Rather than envisioning richly textured oriental carpets with which I longed to cover the floors and yards of Venetian lace hung at the windows, that first day of official ownership I walked through the house making note of which rooms could be closed off completely. No need to heat emptiness.

Within minutes I decided to ignore the entire second story for a time and convert one of the downstairs parlors into a temporary bedroom. That left four massive rooms on the main floor to consider. The formal parlor to the left of the entry. The library directly to the right. The dining room with its startling rich mahogany-paneled walls. And the kitchen, which stretched the full width of the back of the house.

At my mother’s knee I learned to make do, to use creativity where money failed. But that first gray day, with the sun fighting a losing battle with the cloud cover, I could not rouse creativity from its untimely slumber. The emptiness kept its smothering hand over any thoughts wanting to be born.

How uncharming the house seemed, even as Aunt Phoebe became in the later stages of her illness. Sunken cheeks and sallow, parchment-thin skin. Relentless, suffocating cough that stopped only when her fight was over and her spirit lost its need for breath.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to remember her before she became sick. Rosy cheeked. Gracious in speech and movement. Full of vigor. Full of faith that patched all the holes in mine. Floating through those rooms, her skirts brushing past velvet settees and walnut lamp tables.

I opened my eyes to the vacant spaces around me. By the calendar, spring had a good foothold, but I felt chilled and as alone as a sane person dare feel.

How, God? How am I to do what You’ve asked of me? I’ve nothing but imagination left, and even
it
is threatening to resign. How am I to furnish this place—much less manage it—on a few remaining threads of misdirected ambition?

Before I finished formulating my complaint, the answer stole across the floor of the room. Ignoring the film of dust, sunlight fought its way through the beveled glass in the windows of the parlor in which I stood, laying a carpet of color on the floor and papering the walls with elegant, translucent shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

Clouds reclaimed the scene soon enough, extinguishing the splash of color. But the deed was done. I had my answer  . . .  and fresh hope.