Chapter Eighteen

chapter eighteen

December 12, 1929

Lanesborough, New Hampshire

The baby is doing well. Growing, tapping out codes inside my steadily swelling belly. She wakes me up in the middle of the night to say, Hello, I am here, floating inside you.

I have been staying busy. Church on Sunday. The sewing circle Monday. Auxiliary meeting on Wednesday. Bridge with the ladies on Thursday. Times are hard. The foundry closed down, and the paper mill cut its hours in half. A lot of Will’s patients barter for his services these days, paying him with fresh milk, eggs, butter, homemade hard cider, snow shoveling. We aren’t as hard-hit as some, but it seems everywhere I turn I see signs of trouble.

I have been keeping myself busy, but mostly, I wait. I sit by the fire and I wait for winter to be over and for spring to come. For our baby to be born.

Poor Myrtle has not been the same since her trip to the springs. Will has given her pills for her nerves, but I don’t believe they’re helping. She’s lost more weight—her dresses hang on her like a scarecrow woman. She’s fidgety, can’t seem to sit still. She jumps at her own shadow. Felix has been doing better. He’s out of the wheelchair (Will can’t understand how it’s possible!) and now he’s the one caring for her. She continues to attend church and confessed to me that she has nightmares about the woman she believes she saw in the water that day. I told her that the best thing is to forget about it. “Put it out of your mind,” I said. “Felix is well again. Concentrate on that!”

As for myself, I wish I was able to forget the story Myrtle told. I keep playing it over in my mind as the days grow shorter and colder, and the winter shadows play tricks on me. I am nearly as jumpy as poor Myrtle these days.

It’s worse when I’m alone in the house. That’s when I put a Bessie Smith album on the phonograph Will got me for my birthday last year, turn up the lights, and make myself busy. I bake loaves of bread, mend clothing, work on my quilt, cook savory stews and roasts. I sing a little song to myself: I am Mrs. Monroe. I am going to have a baby. Everything is fine. I am happy, happy, happy.

And I clean. I clean until I am exhausted and my hands are red and chapped. I scrub the walls and floors, polish the woodwork. I wax the wood floors. Our house has never been so spotless!

I keep myself busy, but all the while, as I knead the bread or dip my scrub brush into a pail of hot soapy water, some part of my brain is mulling over the question: Could Myrtle truly have seen Eliza Harding in that water?

The thought chills me more deeply than the winter winds that rattle at my windows and doors.

December 15, 1929

Today we had our first real storm of the season. I made cups of hot cocoa, and together Will and I watched the snow fall, piling up along the drive and path, blanketing the house in quiet.

“Will we be trapped?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” he said.

“But what if we were? What if it snowed so hard and for so long that we could not open the doors?”

He laughed. “Then I suppose I’d have to jump out a window.” He leaned forward, kissed my nose. “Don’t worry so, Ethel.”

I closed my eyes.

I am Mrs. Monroe, and it is snowing hard, but I shall not worry. I shall not worry. I shall not worry.

“What are you thinking, darling wife?”

I opened my eyes. “I am thinking about how very lucky I am.”

We stoked up the fire and played Parcheesi, rolling the dice, moving our little pawns around the board. I had a pot roast in the oven and was suddenly ravenous; I have the strangest cravings lately: raw potatoes, chard, sauerkraut, mint jelly. The other day, I found myself eating the peel of an orange, the bitterness deeply satisfying. I went to the kitchen, took a bite of a raw turnip from the root cellar, tasting the dirt that still clung to it, wonderfully gritty on my tongue.

I am Mrs. Monroe. I have strange appetites.

Will settled in by the fireplace with his brandy and a book. I went into the pantry, climbed onto the step stool, and moved aside canned tomatoes from last summer’s garden, onion relish, string beans. At the back, hidden away, I found it: the glass jar Myrtle had brought me, nearly empty now. I untwisted the lid, opened it up, and allowed myself to take the final sip, the one I’d been saving. The sharp, metallic flavor bit into my tongue. I closed my eyes and savored it. For those few seconds, I was back at the springs, the water holding me, caressing me, knowing all my secrets and fears. An arm grabbed me around the waist. I held my breath, ready to be pulled under.

“What on earth are you doing, Ethel?” Will asked. I snapped my eyes open, found I was still balanced on the stool, the empty jar in my hand.

“Just getting some beans for dinner,” I told him, reaching back to the shelf for a jar of string beans. He helped me down off the stool. “You’ve got to be more careful,” he said, touching my enormous belly. He didn’t ask about the empty jar in my other hand.

January 1, 1930

Felix took ill again on New Year’s Eve. Myrtle ran over without her overcoat or a hat on and arrived at our door half-frozen, with icicles in her hair and in near hysterics. I brought her inside and wrapped her in a heavy wool blanket. “It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Will should know what to do.” Then I poured her a bit of apple brandy to settle her nerves.

While Will was getting his bag, she moved close and whispered, “Do you have any of the water left? Any at all?” Her eyes were frantic, streaked with red. She explained that all of hers was gone. Felix had drunk the last of it three days ago and began to lose the feeling in his legs almost immediately. But this time the numbness, the paralysis, was spreading up. Now, she said, he could not use his arms. Worse than that, he was having difficulty breathing.

“I need more spring water, but I can’t bring myself to go.” She pulled the blanket around her tightly, wringing the edges in her hands. She was still shivering despite the warmth of our kitchen. “I should have gone back before winter set in, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I was too afraid. I am too afraid.” I patted her back, told her everything would be all right. I was wrong to make such promises.

The sad fact is, little could be done. Will had Felix brought to the hospital by ambulance and stayed with them.

Felix was dead by morning. A spinal infection, they said.

Such a ghastly way to start off the new year.

Will came home at dawn to tell me the news. He gets a certain look when he has truly terrible news to deliver: a sadness in his eyes, two little worry lines on his brow. He took me in his arms, kissed my head.

“Honestly, Ethel,” he said. “It’s a miracle he had so many good years after the war. The amount of shrapnel in that man’s body, the damage done—I don’t understand how he was up and walking around.”

I started to get my coat and hat.

“Where are you going, Ethel?”

“To Myrtle, of course. She shouldn’t be alone.”

He shook his head, told me Myrtle was in the hospital herself under heavy sedation.

“Then I’ll go to her there.”

Will took the coat from my arms, hung it back up in the closet. “You’ll do no such thing. Myrtle isn’t herself. She’s in no shape for visitors, and seeing her like this would just upset you.”

“But I—”

“You have to think of the baby,” he told me, resting his hand on my belly, rubbing gently.

January 8, 1930

Last night I dreamed of the pool again. It was calling my name. The voice was as soothing as a stream flowing over rocks. Singsongy and familiar. “You said you would give anything,” it reminded me. “Anything to have a child.”

“What is it you want from me?” I asked.

The sound of running water turned to laughter that shook me to the bone.