But if love is blind, happiness is kind. I felt no longer bitter but merely sad and generous toward both of us, my mother and me. I saw now that the reason for her roughness and hurry must have been that she had not wanted to give herself time to dwell upon the anxious, ashamed frugality of her affection. I saw that she must have regarded my being born to her at all as a bewildering miscarriage of justice. For her, it must have been beyond comprehension that she of all people should be granted a live baby girl, let alone one who survived babyhood. But what could she do about a moral error that could be only God’s? Since I was alive and remained so, she discharged her obligations as a mother with ruthless attention (being nothing if not conscientious), but she refused herself any joy in my upbringing.
On the Friday five days after the photograph in the garden was taken, on an identical, shriveling hot afternoon after everybody had stopped saying the weather was lovely, my mother went next door to mind baby Annabel while Marjorie popped out to pick up the developed film from the pharmacy. Annabel had been difficult all day-too much sun, probably-but she had gone down to sleep in her cot at last, and Marjorie didn’t want to risk setting her off again by putting her in the pram and lugging her on and off the bus in the heat. But she was desperate to get into town that afternoon for the pictures because the pharmacy was closed on Saturdays. There were lots of new ones of Annabel, as well as last Sunday’s tea party in the garden.
None of these details was mentioned while my mother was alive. I heard them from my father afterward, over the years, in faint, unintentional allusions and references and little wisps of fact, never the whole story at once. And in retrospect, the thirteen years of my childhood before my mother died, before I knew a single thing about Annabel Porter, seem to have been a strange kind of waiting time, when I was learning, without understanding what it was, to live half-drowned in the backwash of an old disaster. It was always there, never spoken of but still the reason why certain words and phrases could bring conversation to a halt: Inquest. Heat wave. Died in infancy. It hung around like a kind of eerie damp rising up from a long-ago flood that was now a stagnant pool in the cellar of a house where the words flood and cellar were unmentionable.
On that Friday afternoon, Marjorie wouldn’t, she told my mother, take so much as a peek at the photos before she got them home, she’d wait and they’d look at them together. I thought of all the pictures I would take of my own baby, and I could imagine Marjorie, glowing with the kindness of her gesture, sitting on the bus with the packet warm in her hands, the crackly waxed paper around the photographs still sealed. Brave, barren Irene, she was thinking, so disappointed and deserving and sweetly interested in Annabel, a perfectly sensible woman when she wasn’t going overboard on the religion. A book of illustrated Bible stories when the baby was a week old, honestly! She could be given at least this, a little share in the immaculate newness of the newest baby photographs.
Had Marjorie really thought all that, sitting on the bus? I didn’t know, and my father had no patience with that kind of conjecture, but in those early days at the cabin, I was certain that she had.
And now here she comes, openhearted Marjorie, through her own back door, calling out to Irene to get the kettle on and they’ll look at the photographs over a cup of tea. She drops the packet and her handbag on the kitchen table, kicks off the shoes that have made her feet swell, and peels away the chiffon head scarf from her soft tower of hair. Irene, looking frowsy and blue about the gills, walks to the sink with the kettle. She’s been feeling off since the heat wave, everything turns her stomach, it must be her age, once upon a time she would have been in the sun all day and loving every minute. Over the running of the tap, she says she looked in on Annabel twice and she’s sound asleep and there hasn’t been a squeak; the mite must have worn herself out this morning with her colic. Marjorie lights the gas, takes the kettle from Irene and sets it over the flame. She puts a saucepan of water on to a gentle simmer and lowers in the sterilized bottle of baby formula. She pulls at two or three escaping strands of hair and tucks them back into the nest of her hairdo, then heads up the stairs in her damp stockinged feet to bring Annabel down for her feed.
It begins as a high keening, a wail that strangely comes and goes as if Marjorie’s whole body is spilling away into a place that’s bottomless and echoing, as if she is drowning in her own agony and also trying to struggle up out of it, screaming with terror. It rides over other sounds: the whistle of the kettle on the gas, the last bubble of water boiling dry in the unwatched pan, and the snap of glass as the feeding bottle bursts, the hiss of milk curds roasting on searing hot tin.
And Irene is rooted in the kitchen doorway and has no words to meet anything as fearsome as this, Marjorie with that look on her face, clutching her dead baby against her and screaming, Marjorie bursting her way out the front door and making off down the road still screaming, holding out her child to people who are now coming from their houses to see what the noise is about. Irene cannot follow. She is trying to stop her bones from shaking themselves loose inside their thin wrappings of muscle, she has set her jaw against letting her own screams escape; she holds on to the doorposts, but sudden pains are shooting inside her and she can’t control the noxious rocking in the cavity of her stomach, which now is slopping with vomit and disgorging it, without warning, all over the floor.
Though she survived another thirteen years, I am certain my mother was never free of the noise of that afternoon in her head, its heat on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth. It made no difference to her that the inquest concluded three weeks later it was a cot death. She had never heard of cot death. Babies sometimes just stopped breathing for no known medical reason, it was mercifully rare but becoming more common? That was no explanation at all. The doctor and coroner were merely giving a name to some newly invented peril for healthy babies. Cot death? The child had died in Irene’s care. She should not have touched her. She should have picked her up. She should have covered her, uncovered her, turned her on her side, not turned her, opened the window, closed the window. She should have kept her alive. In taking the blame on herself, she was not discouraged by the Porters nor, it seemed, the whole town. Nobody else had heard of cot death, either.
My mother came to believe, once she could no longer deny that the disturbance in her own body was a pregnancy, so late and unlooked-for it felt unnatural, that she had taken Annabel’s life as surely as if she had choked the child or driven a blade through her chest. Because there must have been a moment when she had sucked the life out of the baby’s unconscious body and drawn it up, somehow, into hers; that must be why she had left the darkened nursery forgetting to whisper “God bless you,” and feeling even more nauseous and drowsy and faint.
And it wasn’t enough that she believed she’d done it, my father told me, she still had to know how God could have let her. She spoke to her priest, not that it helped. He couldn’t convince her that some force within her had not stolen the child’s life. It must be, she reasoned, that in smoothing Annabel’s hair with too much yearning, she had tapped a well in herself that was not love at all but some distortion of love, something visceral and needy and covetous. She had craved her own baby too much, and there had been nothing to protect Annabel from such aching, unguarded cupidity. The child had been christened, and had that done a thing to keep her sanctified soul moored within her body? I imagined a flummoxed young minister reaching for the orthodox comforts about baptism and the life everlasting. But my mother would have shaken her head. No, God had declined to lift a finger to save Annabel, and so where did that leave it, the soul? Unprotected. Anywhere. Nowhere. There was nothing eternal, or still, or unique about it. It did not-it could not-belong to God. It was not merely unsanctified but unsanctifiable. She knew.