The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (27 page)

In the fifth month of their relationship, the weather changed abruptly. Bell woke one morning to the crisp, clean air of fall. That evening after work she found herself jumping into a pile of leaves that had been raked to the edge of a lawn. And still in her heels and office clothes. Ha! She walked home smiling and called Lawrence.

“Maybe it’s from when I was a little girl and used to get so excited about the new school year, but I am so happy in the fall. I feel like everything is starting again,” she told him.

“You want to start again with me too?” he asked.

“Oh, stop it,” she said.

“You stop it. I’m sick of you hiding me in the house and using me for your pleasure.” He laughed. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I don’t ever want to take my girl out.”

“Your what? Your g—?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Well, I’m not hiding anybody,” Bell replied.

“Then meet me at Wanamaker’s tomorrow at six o’clock,” he replied. “I’ll bring a surprise.”

At 6:00 the next day, Bell rushed down the center aisle of Wanamaker’s to the bronze statue of the eagle, where she and Lawrence had arranged to meet. “There he is!” she thought when she saw him. She quickened her pace. He’d brought her flowers—the bouquet flared crimson against the slate gray of his suit. A small brown shopping bag hung loosely from his fingers. The store was crowded. Shoppers milled around him carrying boxes and bags or tugging children behind them. How striking he was standing among them, how handsome.

“Lawrence!” Bell called. It was only then that she noticed he was in conversation with someone obscured behind the eagle.

She called again as she drew closer, “Lawrence!”

He turned. “Here’s my girl!” Lawrence said, extending his hand toward Bell in greeting. The fabric of her skirt fluttered against her legs. She was glad she’d bought a new dress for their date; he was the sort of man who was pleased by new dresses.

The woman Lawrence had been talking to stepped into the aisle, expectant and smiling. His hand was on her elbow.

“This is my dear friend Hattie,” he said.

My God, Bell thought, looking at her mother, we’re so alike. She knew she ought to say something, or feel something, but her attention fixed on the flat, leonine slope of the bridge of Hattie’s nose—the same slope as Bell’s own nose. And our eyes have the same slight downward turn at the outer corners. Mother and daughter stood facing each other, each with her hand on her upper chest just below the clavicle. Bell was suddenly enraged with Lawrence. Pathetic old man! So easily duped by sex and youth and flattery. If he had looked at me at all, she thought, if he had bothered to really look at me, he would have seen Mother in my face. The resemblance would have leapt out to him, as it leapt out to Bell in that moment. But then she remembered that she too had been blind to their likeness. She had denied it as a kind of revenge against Hattie. As if to say, I don’t want you either. I don’t even see you.

“Bell!” Hattie said.

Lawrence looked from Bell’s face to Hattie’s and then at Bell again. His hand flew to his mouth, such a feminine gesture.

Hattie backed away from them. She bumped into a man who was passing behind her and lost her balance. Lawrence rushed forward, throwing the bouquet and the little brown bag to the ground, and caught Hattie as she fell. With Lawrence’s hand on her arm, she righted herself clumsily. She looked old just then; it seemed to Bell that the flesh of her face was slack and wobbled a little around the chin. Despite the horror of the moment, the sweetness in the way Lawrence reached for Hattie made Bell think of an old man reaching for his old wife whom he had loved for years and years, whom he had picked up when she faltered for years and years. Hattie had a shopping bag that fell to the floor when she tripped. Lawrence picked it up and held it out toward her. She took it and pressed the brown bag to her chest. She was crying.

“I’d better get to my shopping,” Hattie said and lowered the bag. She tried to take hold of the handles, but her hands shook.

“I’ll finish my shopping,” she repeated, but she didn’t move.

Lawrence was talking. He had been talking all along, Bell realized, but she had not heard him because her mother was standing in front of her fumbling with an old shopping bag and weeping.

“She said her name was Caroline,” Lawrence said. “She told me she was from Boston. I didn’t know, Hattie. I swear I didn’t.”

Hattie shook her head, but her feet still didn’t move. A clerk approached them and asked if everything was all right. She was smartly dressed and suspicious. Hattie turned to her.

“I’m just …” She took a deep breath. “I’m just looking for the linen department.”

The clerk began to give directions, but Hattie walked away from her toward the exit.

Bell was left alone with Lawrence. There was nothing she could say. She reached toward him. He let her put her hand on his arm for an instant. He picked up the roses and the little bag, handed them to her, and then dashed after Hattie. Bell did not hear from either of them again.

BELL’S MOTHS BEAT
their knife wings in her chest. The pain was astonishing. Her limbs went slack and her eyes closed, and she was suddenly thrust into a sludgy half-conscious darkness from which she was sure she would not return. She dreamed that someone was knocking on the door. She was in a house like the one Lawrence lived in, and her body was as robust as it had been when she was with him. Bell walked through the rooms effortlessly, taking in great lungfuls of air, feeling the oxygen in her blood, the molecules of it quick as minnows in her blood. She opened the front door. It was hailing. The hail crashed against the railings of the porch and on the eaves. Someone called her name. She couldn’t find the source of the voice in the storm.

“Bell!”

She wished the voices away.

“Bell! Bell!”

She woke. The hallucination persisted.

“Bell!”

She was too weak to answer the door. She couldn’t keep her eyes open for more than a few seconds. “Please stop,” she whispered. “Please stop.”

“It’s Willie. You in there, gal?”

Willie. Juju Willie with the jungle in her back room—now I know I’m dreaming, Bell thought.

Something crashed in the living room. She heard wood splintering and then a voice.

“Ain’t no lights in here?” and “What’s that stink?”

Then there were footsteps and someone shaking her shoulders.

“Bell! Dear Lord Jesus. Bell?”

She opened her eyes long enough to see Hattie’s face hovering above her and Willie a step behind.

“She’s alive,” Hattie said.

Sometime later there was a commotion of light and hands, sirens and street noises. A mask was placed over her face. A needle pricked her arm. She slept.

BELL WOKE TO
various discomforts: an itching on her cheek where the plastic edge of the oxygen mask irritated her skin, a dry mouth, an ache in her hand from the IV. If she wiggled her fingers, she could see the needle move beneath her skin. How fragile we are, she thought. An apparatus next to her bed had green and red flashing lights and beeped steadily. All of this just to keep one body functioning.

The hospital room didn’t have a window to the outside. Half of one wall was a rectangle of glass that faced a busy corridor. Hattie was asleep in a chair pulled close to the window. Her head was tilted so it rested on the back of the chair. Someone had tucked a blanket around her; only her face was visible. Look, Bell thought, as she had when she was a girl on the school bus, there’s my mother. Bell could have cried in gratitude. Hattie’s glasses had slipped down her nose. Her neck will hurt when she wakes up, Bell thought. She ought to have a pillow.

Bell didn’t know if it was day or night, a clock above the nurse’s desk read simply 11:00. Nurses hurried down the hallway outside of her room, but that gave no indication of the time. And Hattie was sleeping, but that was no indication either. Bell’s moths were still. She could feel the weight of them crushing her chest, the knife-winged legions clinging to her lungs like sleeping bats in a cave.

A nurse wearing a surgical mask approached the door to Bell’s room. Hattie woke and gestured toward Bell. The nurse shook her head and came in alone. Hattie stood at the window with her hand on the glass. Bell raised her arm in greeting, and her mother nodded at her. Another nurse came along and put her arm around Hattie’s shoulder and gave her a Styrofoam cup of something hot. What a shock it was to see Hattie inspire so much tenderness.

The nurse told Bell that she had been in the hospital for three days. She was in quarantine and would be there until the tuberculosis was no longer contagious—at least three weeks, maybe more. She would be given medication to kill the bacteria that caused the disease and other medication to break up the congestion in her chest. She would cough a lot but not like before. Until her lung function improved, she shouldn’t try to talk. They would give her a chalkboard and a notepad. She was very lucky; she had nearly died. The nurse injected something into the IV, and sleep closed over Bell like water over a drowning person.

Walter came to see her. He was terrifying; his eyes were red and he paced in front of Bell’s room like a caged leopard. Had he always been so frightening? He looked like he might strangle a nurse. When she waved, he came into her room.

“Walter!” she said. “You can’t come in here! You’ll catch TB.”

“You already gave it to me. Look at my eyes. See how red they are? And my teeth.”

He opened his mouth, and his teeth were gone. A little black ball, not bigger than a marble, rested on his tongue. “What’s that?” she asked. He told her it was her sickness, that he had sucked it out of her with such force that it knocked out all of his teeth. Then he swallowed the black ball and left the room. “Walter!” she called after him.

A nurse shook her awake, “Miss Shepherd! Calm down now. Calm down.” Hattie watched through the window with both hands pressed to the glass.

Bell spat into a silver bowl the nurses gave her. As the days passed, she spat more and more. First the phlegm was frothy and red as strawberry soda. Her throat hurt from the coughing, but her chest wasn’t as heavy, and her breathing was less labored. On her little chalkboard she asked the nurses about the time, or other practical matters, like what day she’d have her next round of X-rays. She couldn’t think what else to write. She had intended to die and here she was living. Now her life stretched endlessly, bleakly, before her. She ought to rip the IV from her hand.

One afternoon the nurse came in with pills in small paper cups on a tray. Bell wrote:
No.
She shook her head as the nurse lifted the oxygen mask and held the pills toward her. “Miss Shepherd,” the nurse said. “No funny business.” She shook her head again. From the corner of her eye she saw Hattie rise from her chair in front of the glass window. When Bell was a little girl, and sick, Hattie had taken her by the chin and forced medicine down her throat. At the time Bell had not recognized this as love. Now, as her mother advanced toward the door to the room, her arm outstretched as if to turn the knob and enter, she wore the same stern expression. Bell saw the tenderness in it—Hattie’s tenderness, which was always hard. She swallowed the nurse’s pills.

Hattie came every day. Their interaction consisted of waving to each other. On the sixth day Bell wrote,
what is the weather
on her little chalkboard and held it up for Hattie to see. Immediately she felt ridiculous. She had probably written it too small for her mother to read, and Bell wouldn’t be able to hear her answer anyway. Hattie would think her silly and trivial. There were so many other things she wanted to say, but she only had a chalkboard and she lacked courage. Tears came to her eyes. Hattie fished a piece of paper and a pen from her handbag. She scribbled something on the paper and pressed it to the window: a drawing of a big dark cloud from which a cascade of slanted dashes fell. “Raining,” Hattie mouthed.

From then on their visits began with Hattie’s drawings of the weather. She brought a ball of yarn and sat crocheting in the chair by the glass. Hattie was inscrutable as ever, but it was true what Bell’s sisters had said—she was calmer, the old rage had receded. There was an ease between them that they’d never had. They had been uncomfortable with one another long before Bell’s relationship with Lawrence. When Bell came to Wayne Street for holidays or the odd Sunday dinner, she and Hattie avoided each other’s eyes and were stiff and formal if they found themselves alone in a room. Maybe, Bell thought, Hattie hated her because she knew Bell had seen her with Lawrence when she was a child. But that isn’t true, Bell thought. I’m the one that hated her because of Lawrence. When Bell saw the two of them together years ago, she understood that Hattie was capable of immense happiness. Bell and her siblings only saw a miserable woman who heaped punishment on her children—for running on the stairs, for a hint of insubordination, for wanting things she did not think it would be possible for them to have.

Adulthood brought Bell a kind of freedom but no relief. She felt defective in some vital way, incapable of doing the right thing. She was constantly afraid that some force would strike her down for her failings. She wanted to ask her sisters and brothers if they felt the same way. But they’d made their peace with Hattie years ago, maybe because they already knew that the force that would strike them wouldn’t be their mother, but something of their own making. At some point in their lives Bell’s sisters stopped blaming Hattie for their messes. Maybe Mother didn’t know that she was supposed to love us, Bell thought. But she’s old now and life does not require her to be so ferocious.