Chapter 7D

Mom convulsed into a tight ball on her side and retched feebly, making a small sticky red stain in the kleenex she held to her mouth. Then she relaxed with a pitiful moan.

"What's wrong?" I asked, going swiftly to her side of the bed.

She licked her lips clean and tried to catch her breath. Not getting an answer, I raised my voice fearfully. "What's wrong? What happened?"

"I'm sick, Speedy. It came on... all of a sudden."

"What's wrong? When did it start?"

"Called your daddy... but he said he had to work late."

I was incensed at her words. "Had to work late? Work late? What does he expect you to do, just stay sick?"

"Well, I don't know... maybe it'll just clear up."

"How long have you been sick?"

She shrugged, taking in a deep breath and wiping her lips again. "A couple of hours, I guess."

"You've been sick for hours and he just says he has to work late?" I threw up my hands in anger and walked in a small, confused circle in the room and looked back down at her with my eyes flaring. "What can I do?"

She shook her head. She hid her face from me and did not seem to want to tell me what was happening. "I don't know... Call your daddy, and see what he says."

I went straight to the kitchen wall phone and telephoned the grocery store. My stepdad answered the phone with a tired, bored voice.

"Mama's real sick," I said. "She's throwing up blood."

"Hell, it's one of those female things, she's been sick to her stomach and throwing up for weeks."

"But she's throwing up blood!" I insisted. "You don't throw up blood when you're just sick to your stomach."

He said forcefully, "I told you, it's one of those female things." Then he eased off. "That kind of stuff is all in their minds, anyway."

"Well... what should I do?"

"Don't do anything," he answered, unconcerned. "I'll be home in about an hour or two. Tell her to drink some water."

"But... she's acting like it hurts really bad."

"You know how she is, she overdoes everything. Tell her to drink some water or some soda, and I'll be home later."

His indifference told me I was wasting my time. I said I would look after Mom, said goodbye and ran back into the bedroom where I stood beside the bed, helpless and frustrated.

"He said drink some water and he'll be home later."

"I can't drink water," Mom said, her breath short and labored. "I tried that, it came right up." Then she made a retching sound again, down deep in her throat, and tried to hold back. But another convulsion soon overtook her and she coiled up again, her neck stretching in a fierce heave outward, and more blood spilled onto the tissue and onto the bedspread. This time she did not simply moan and come out of it, but bent herself into a small trembling circle and grasped her stomach and began to cry and cough.

I touched her shoulder, but did not know what to do. She heaved again, and groaned, and finally relaxed.

"Mom... What can I do?"

She hid her face but reached out with one hand and grabbed my arm tightly. Her fingers trembled and her entire form shivered. She spoke with a breathless rasp, "Go down the street... to your Aunt Catherine's. I tried to call her, but her line's busy... bring her here."

My Aunt Catherine was one of my stepdad's sisters. She lived in a house a few doors down from ours. Quickly, my fear for my Mom's pain giving me a bloodcurdling case of the shakes, I ran to the front door.

"Put your jacket on!" my mother yelled. "It's cold outside!"

I thought: to hell with the damn jacket! I rushed into the night and ran up the street as fast as I could. By the time I pounded on Aunt Catherine's front door I was out of breath. I tried not to panic. I told Aunt Catherine to get to my house as fast as she could, that my Mom was deathly sick and it was getting worse.

She stood in the doorway gaping at me. "Why, Speedy, what's wrong?"

"I don't know. She needs somebody. Hurry!"

"But what's the--?"

"Now! She needs somebody now!"

Quickly she grabbed her overcoat and threw it loosely over her shoulders. "You stay here," she said, trying to calm both herself and me. "Watch my baby, Speedy, I can't leave her here alone. I'm goin' down there right now, don't you worry." And she ran down the sidewalk with her loose coat flapping in the wind.

I watched Aunt Catherine's sleeping infant for over half an hour. Several times I peeked out the front door to see what might be happening down the street at my house. Then an ambulance with flashing lights pulled into our driveway. I longed to get a closer look but was afraid to leave the baby alone. Going back to check on the child I found her still sleeping, and by the time I returned to the front door, two white-uniformed attendants were shoving a loaded stretcher into ambulance. I could not see much detail. The lights began flashing again and the ambulance backed out swiftly, then screeched as it turned up the street and took off with sirens wailing.

My mother had suffered a miscarriage. I was deeply affected and spent days shuddering at the thought of how emotionally and physically painful it must have been for her. But at the same time I was angered at discovering that not one of my puritanical family or relatives would mention the details or even the word "miscarriage" in my presence -- I gathered what had happened from bits and pieces of conversation that leaked out now and then. During the few days my mom spent in the hospital I was shipped off to my maternal grandmother's house a few miles down the road and endured her endless chatter and bad jokes when she drove me to school each morning in her creaky 1950 Ford. She evaded my questions about what had happened to my mother, but I figured it out when I overheard her telling a neighbor that "the baby died."

It was with deep concern that I came from school one day and Grandma told me she was taking me home because my mother would be out of the hospital that afternoon. As we drove and my grandma lapsed into another awful and unmemorable country joke, I felt some hope that perhaps the unfortunate incident would somehow narrow some of the distance between my family and myself. Waiting for Mom and my stepdad to show up, I paced the living room floor restlessly until I saw our tan Ford arrive shortly before sunset. Mom was in a bathrobe and overcoat and my stepdad, now treating her with more deference and attention than I had seen before, opened the car and slowly and carefully led her to our door.

Mom entered, looking tired but happy to be home again, and looked down at me and gave me a weak hug. "Well," she said, "I'm back."

"What was wrong with you?' I asked. "Are you all right now?"

She averted my eyes and turned to go to the bedroom. "Well, I was just real real... sick, Speedy."

My stepdad held her arm as she slowly and haltingly made her way into the hallway and the bedroom. He completely ignored me, which was exactly what I would have expected. I watched my mother struggle into their bedroom, bracing herself against a door or a wall as Tony guided her past the framed portraits of the Virgin and the Sacred Heart and Saint Jude in the hallway. I watched her getting farther and farther away from me. Farther than ever. I sensed her pain. I shared her loss. And I felt a distance that I had little hope of breaching again.

Later in my room and I heard the two of them talking in hushed tones. Mom was crying softly.

My stepdad spoke in a consoling manner I'd never heard him use. "His soul will be protected, I know it will," he said.

"But, Tony, I was unconscious," my mother softly cried. "No one knew to baptize the child. It'll be in limbo forever."

"There, now," he kept saying.

The incident had changed the way my stepdad generally treated Mom. But it did nothing to quiet my anger nor smooth the raw feeling I had of not being part of the household I lived in. I was disgusted with the way he'd ignored her pain for weeks until the result was disaster and heartbreak. I was glad he'd had a comeuppance and that he'd earned it the hard way. And I knew that my mother's rigid religious fervor meant that I would never be able to share with her my blasphemous ideas or my certainty that answers to the mysteries of the universe did not lie in fairy tales. I could have said that the hereafter didn't exist anyway. I could have fudged and said that surely their all-merciful God would not forever consign an innocent fetus to limbo. But there was no way, in that house whose furniture and walls were dotted with pictures of saintly figures and suffering martyrs and plastic figurines of Jesus, that I could communicate through their wall of myth and superstition.

I understood their suffering. But I could not forgive them for leaving me alone in a world so different and so distant from theirs.

But this time I didn't retreat into a cave. Instead, I lived in multiple worlds. In each world, I developed a suitable persona.

In the first place, it was difficult to "retreat" from two huge Italian families. One was the smaller, but heavily populated, clan of my mother and deceased father. The other was my step-dad's large congregation, more ambitious and lively and numbering in the hundreds. Young cousins abounded in this new group, and the aunts and uncles were more than friendly. But I shared few interests with them, so I formed no strong friendships.

Yet another world was the one of my own making. I dived headlong into one school project after another. The drama clubs seemed to get into my blood; I ended up performing in plays at two different Catholic grammar schools, and even landed the part of a young kid in a play at the prestigious Christian Brothers High School. And I had a brief stint at our Little League, which fit well into the world of my parents. But my athletic career was cut short by the long bus rides to and from rehearsals at Christian Brothers. That trip was necessary because my stepdad left the supermarket too late for me to hitch a ride. Nor did my folks help out with bus fare, which was subsidized by the two or three bucks I received whenever I stayed with my Uncle Johnny. When I announced to my folks that I was cutting out Little League practice to work in the plays, I thought they would turn white. For a time, I suppose, my trips to the Little League must have meant to them that I was gradually becoming "normal". But the drama club and the school newspaper and my volunteer work at the school library put the League to rest forever.

The biggest factor, I suppose, was my relationship with Martha Jane. It seemed to separate me from everyone I knew, especially from kids my own age.

The full enjoyment of that relationship seemed forever to be just beyond our grasp. She was terrifically busy, taking extra classes and working her way through. Needless to say, not only did I have great affection and a solid case of the hots for her, but I also had tremendous admiration and respect for her determination and talent. I saw few of her qualities in either of my families, most of whom were complacently middle class or better; none strayed far from the norm, and none seemed to comprehend that there were other worlds and other ideas outside the Memphis city limits.

It was the world of Martha Jane that made my other worlds seem so suffocating and schizoid. It was those "other worlds", those "other" people, so strict and pasteurized, so formulaic and depersonalizing, that made the world of Martha Jane so necessary, and yet so strangely colored.

The more time I spent in the world away from Martha Jane, the more I understood her fanatic drive to succeed and move away. By the time I was thirteen, I was beginning to develop that same, desperate ambition. In understanding her need, I was never tempted to hold her at fault for wanting a way out. I knew she couldn't stand living in false worlds any more than I. In one way this united us, in other ways it often kept us apart.

And what a strange world, the world Martha Jane and I had been building for ourselves. We couldn't see other that often. First of all, both of us were too busy. We lived on opposite sides of town, separated by long bus lines. Even if we continued to live next door to each other, there was only so much social life that could be expected by a woman in her twenties and a boy just breaking into teenhood, despite the fact that I took after my Uncle Frank in that I rapidly began to look older than my years.

Yet our world persisted. Adamantly. Secretly.

We wrote short letters now and then, or sent cards, with Martha Jane afraid to write anything momentous for fear of my folks getting their hands on it.

We were apart more often than together. Martha Jane and I were in school and she worked most weekends. But she attended my thirteenth birthday, held at my Grandma Rose's home. It was a small gathering of a dozen or so survivors of my first dad's immediate circle. There was my Aunt Lucille and her husband, Uncle Jack, a strange pair whose actual relationship to my father was so convoluted that no one could explain it. They stubbornly maintained that their one, true, valid relationship with me was that they were my father's original choice as my godparents, an honor that Aunt Lucille and Uncle Jack claimed with an almost violent passion was stolen from them by my Aunt Frances. And, naturally, at my thirteenth birthday, this aunt and uncle got into an argument with Aunt Frances over who should be my godparents. Poor Aunt Frances simply sat with her big, round eyes looking confused while Aunt Lucille and Uncle Jack repeated their claim again and again with some other relatives.

The discussion was interrupted by the late arrival of Martha Jane, who lived at Memphis State in a nearby neighborhood. She entered looking tired but so beautiful and charming that I was struck by the fact that she didn't seem to belong to this group of flaccid, listless people any more than I did. She entered wearing a pale drink dress and loafers and, despite the horn-rimmed glasses and the dull hairdo, she seemed as radiant as sunshine next to the others.