Kathy Little Bird (14 page)

“Y
OU
were gone an hour after that six-pack.”

“I took a walk.” Spoken demurely, sweetly, so he wouldn’t dump us when he found out. Some people are naturally kind and sweet-natured, my Mum for instance. But it’s wearing on me to even pretend. I dreamed of being rescued by a big-time record producer. He’d hear me, the bucks would roll in, and I’d get a nanny for Kathy. Because of course the baby was Kathy, she couldn’t be anything else. One of those big blond Swedish girls would be perfect. We’d live in a penthouse in New York City or maybe a horse ranch in Nashville while I sang ethnic songs at the Grand Ole Opry. And I’d thought of a beautiful Cree lullaby to sing to Kathy.

“So now what’s taking so long?” This from the couch where he sprawled watching the tube.

“I can’t find the bottle opener.”

“It’s in plain sight on the counter.”

I was careful to pour the beer so it ran down the inside of the tilted glass. Jack didn’t like a head. I brought it and curled up beside him on the couch.

It was hard when he was in one of his losing spells not to say anything. Hard to laugh at jokes I’d heard before. Hard to be all sweetness and light. Hardest of all was repressing a desire to tell everyone about my baby. Jas and Morrie were uncles. Imagine. How surprised they’d be. And Elk Woman should know so she could sing Cree prayers for Kathy. Elk Woman was able to dream the Grandmothers, who would protect and guide her. My thoughts, like the wild geese, flew in formation back to Alberta. Back to…but I choked on his name. I’d taken a different path. I’d left him standing alone before the preacher’s house.

There was something else I had to repress—my music. That’s the way I had come to think of the Cree chanting that filled my head. I let it out only under my breath, and only in the bathroom. The power was in Jack’s hands. I couldn’t alienate him and I couldn’t lose jobs. We needed all the money we could pile up.

I was almost six months along when I told him, and by then anyone with half an eye could see. It was New Year’s Eve and I’d pulled off an unexpected gig, subbing for a group stuck in a blizzard. The roadhouse gave me a bonus. I figured
Jack would be in a good mood, and the time was as right as it would ever be.

I’d nerved myself up to it once before, but then JFK was assassinated and Jack was upset, blaming LBJ, blaming Hoover, the New York underworld, even Castro. No one could come near him for days. Now he was a little high on champagne. I seized the opportunity, and with a big grin, which I plastered over a scared, sinking sensation, suggested we drink a toast to the baby.

Rage, fury, accusations pelted me. I stood my ground. I wanted to say I hadn’t done it by myself, that he should try to be happy about it. But he had the power, and ended by saying, “We’ll have to attend to this.”

I smiled my most ingratiating smile. “Too late.”

That precipitated another eruption. He accused. He calculated. Then in case he’d made a mistake, calculated again. He pleaded and threatened by turns. I went into the place in my head where I keep my music, and stayed there until he stormed himself out. When I saw he had simmered down sufficiently, I told him my plan. “I feel fine. I never have morning sickness. Sometimes I’m a bit on the queasy side when I turn in, but a cracker to nibble on fixes that. Anyway, since I feel good I’ll be able to sing right up to the end.”

“No one’s going to pay money for a pregnant broad to get up on stage.”

“I’m carrying it well. You didn’t even know. I had to tell you.”

“Six months is not nine months.”

“I’ve got it worked out. I’ll wear one of those caftans that hang loose, and I’ll have a flowing scarf. I’ll be a bit on the heavy side, but they won’t know.”

“Well,” he considered, “I guess there’s nothing for it but to take things a day at a time.”

“I wonder,” I asked the room in general, “if she’ll have red hair.”

Jack glared at me. “She better have.” Then, “Wait a minute, why
she?
Boys run in my family.”

“Girls run in mine.”

My life with Jack hadn’t been what I’d imagined. I’d known for some time that the road map I’d drawn from Mum’s kitchen straight to stardom had been unrealistic. Things got in the way. People got in the way. Life got in the way, especially babies.

I put my hands flat against my hard, smooth belly. I felt that each job now would be my last. This week or next or the week after I’d be given the boot. There are limits to what a caftan can conceal, no matter how voluminous. I’m sure most everybody guessed, but no one had said anything…yet.

I prepared for the inevitable by saving whatever I could, watching out for sales, and forgetting the beer when I could get away with it, claiming I’d run out of money. Fortunately, Jack never knew for sure if I was holding out on him. He suspected though, and he was surly.

We weren’t doing too well in Wisconsin, so Jack got on the phone to Minneapolis, where I’d gone over so big. On the phone Jack was the greatest. To hear him tell it, our passage
through Wisconsin was like a prairie fire. The biggest clubs in Chicago were clamoring for me, but there was a chance we could squeeze in a return appearance, being friends and all. They bit.

Minneapolis–St. Paul. That’s where I’d look for a nice rooming house with nice people, a place I could bring a baby to.

Jack Sullivan wouldn’t make much of a father. I wished it had been someone like Abram. Someone kind like him, reliable like him. In the past, whenever I had to go through something, Abram had been there. Like Mum’s dying; I never could have gotten through that if not for Abram. And life, I reasoned, was as important as death. In a way they were twin happenings.

Sometimes I got scared about having a baby and about our future. I will say for Jack that he did try to comfort me, but it was a puffy cotton-candy kind of comfort. It consisted of spinning another tale; the trouble was I had stopped believing in them. I don’t know exactly when that happened, probably it was back in some fleabag rooming house where there was no hot water, or one of those nights we had to skip without paying. Somewhere along the way I couldn’t force myself to it. It was a game I could no longer play.

A flat-handed pounding on the bathroom door. “How long are you going to hold the can down?”

That very night was the night I was fired. The owner was actually rather sweet about it; he slipped me an extra twenty. What I hadn’t anticipated was Jack’s reaction. He grew very quiet. I had never seen him quiet. He kept looking at me in a
speculative way. I felt I was being evaluated and coming up short. The biblical term occurred to me…weighed and found wanting.

What did he see? A woman swollen with pregnancy, about to have a baby. A career nipped in the bud, an asset turned liability. Domesticity foisted on a carefree spirit. How unattractive that must all seem.

I knew in my bones he was figuring the angles. What if he left me? From his point of view that was a fairly good option. Shucking off me and the kid meant his old freedom, and I knew he was considering it. The cold I felt traveled to my heart.

He slept in mornings, and I house-hunted, taking the car, checking out ads in the paper. The place I liked was a big countrified house on Oakdale Street, and the people were friendly. It was a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mason. The wife was especially nice, offering me lemonade and a slice of pie, homemade lemon meringue like Mum’s. I felt two fat tears on my face and wiped them away fast. But I think she’d seen them. The price she quoted for the large back bedroom where the sun flooded in was quite reasonable. It was just the kind of room to bring a baby to, bright and cheerful, with chintz curtains and a bedspread that matched. If I ever have a home of my own, that’s what I’d have—flowered chintz.

The windows opened onto a large yard with trees. To a child it would look woodsy. I would tell her about real woods, I would tell her about Alberta. “I love it,” I said.

Jack had often warned me never to praise anything I was negotiating for, but that slipped out. Mrs. Mason seemed
genuinely pleased, and I don’t think she put the price up. In fact, when we were in the kitchen and I was finishing the pie, she looked across at her husband as though asking his approval and then mentioned a lower figure.

“We could do it for that if you and your husband and the baby were to stay a while.”

“Oh yes, we’d want to stay.”

She beamed at that.

Jack and I moved in. It didn’t take Mrs. Mason long to figure out that he had no job and wasn’t looking for one. In a lot of ways she reminded me of Mum. For one thing she disapproved of Jack sleeping till noon, and about eight-thirty started up the vacuum.

“Does she have to run that thing at this ungodly hour?” Jack protested to me.

From then on I intercepted Mrs. Mason, and we had coffee together. She confided that they had always wanted a family. She herself came from a large family, second generation in this country, originally Swedish. “From Uppsala,” she said. “But George and I haven’t been blessed with children. When you don’t have them, it seems like such a privilege.”

“Ours wasn’t planned,” I said. “It just happened.”

“What do you want?” she asked. “A boy or a girl?”

“Oh, it’s a girl. She’s already named—Kathy.”

“Like you?’

“Yes, and my Mum. It’s a tradition in our family.” And I told her about Mrs. Mike. “That’s why the girls are always Kathy.”

“I’ve a great respect for tradition. It links the generations.”
She got up to fill our mugs. When she came back she told me that her husband owned his own business. “It’s small, a bicycle shop. But it’s ours. He buys, trades, repairs, and sells them. Both the used and the brand new. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask. What is it your husband does?” She refrained from finishing the sentence with “when he works.”

“Jack? Oh, he’s my manager. You see, I’m a singer.”

It was plain that Mrs. Mason had never expected that a singer and her manager would be boarders in her back bedroom, so I gave her time to digest this information.

“Where do you sing?” she asked.

“That’s Jack’s department. He does my bookings.”

“I was wondering, because my husband is a Moose, and the lodge has a monthly get-together…”

That night, lying in bed beside Jack, I mentioned the Moose and the Shriners as a possibility for additional bookings. But a series of prickings across my abdomen stopped me, letting me know the baby was preparing its move. I panicked. I needed to talk to Mum. I needed someone who had been through it to tell me what it was like, to say I’d do well and have a fine, healthy little girl.

I needed it, but I didn’t have it. All I had was Jack, and he had gone to sleep without answering me. Would he ever be there when I needed him? Suppose when I went to the hospital Jack simply decamped? What would I do? I hadn’t worked in three weeks and our savings were running low. Even my secret hoard would not stretch much further.

I reached out my hand to Jack, an inert lump on the far side of the bed. “Do you love me, Jack?”

“Sure, honey,” and he turned over.

The pains started several hours later.

I shook Jack awake. He inquired drowsily if they were regular.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, when I admitted they came when they wanted to.

By morning it was a different story. The pains were strong, and they clocked.

Now it was Jack who was in a hurry. He bundled me into the car. Mrs. Mason ran out in a robe, her hair in curlers, to give me a hug and a kiss.

I’d never been in a hospital. How stark it was, how impersonal. It stank of cleanliness. They put me in a short, stiff, white muslin gown, slit up the back, and came in to shave me. They pulled and tugged, and for a while it took my mind from the labor pains.

Not for long. They grew in intensity. They grew until they enveloped me. I became the pain. And I realized a terrible thing…this child could not get born. It was stuck inside me, battering to get out. But it couldn’t, it would tear me apart trying, but it couldn’t.

When my insides finally expelled their burden, I felt degutted, as though I’d been turned inside out, and was as weak as water.

They put the baby in my arms. I smiled. She had red hair.

I
WAS
speaking to Jas. He sounded just the same. The same boy I confided in, who was angry at me for not marrying Abram.

“Jas,” I said, “it’s me, Kathy.”

“Who?”

“Kathy, your sister. How many sisters do you have?”

“Kathy?”

“I called to tell you, you’re an uncle. You and Morrie. I just had a baby. Her name’s Kathy. And she has red hair. How are things with you, Jas? And how’s Abram?” Abram had moved away.

You think you’re insulated and then a possibility like this jars you, displacing the comforting pictures in your head. The one I liked best was Abram sitting on the steps of his house whittling. I wanted him right there where he’d kissed me and knew he loved me. I was devastated that he had moved.

“Moved where?” But I didn’t wait for an answer. “He didn’t go and get married, did he?”

Jas only laughed.