When she was nude, I let my hands run over her body, said through my tears, “Darling, I can't help it, you're so beautiful... like a dream.”
She laughed, low laughter, her voice a warm breeze.
“Too many couch dreams these days—the highest compliment a man can pay a woman... I think.”
“Elma, Elma, you look so... so...”
“Don't say 'innocent,'“ she whispered, those lush lips moving against my cheek and ear. “Man only says that because he thinks he's about to dirty up a woman, to...”
I crushed her to me, her skin a delightfully cool smoothness. She said, “Oh darling... easy... easy.”
The racket in the streets woke us at midnight. We kissed and dutifully wished each other a happy, happy New Year. I was truly at peace with the world: Elma beside me, money under my pillow.... I was fully enjoying that most intimate and delicious of all private little worlds—lovers in bed.
I awoke later and in the dim light I saw her staring up at the ceiling, her eyes wet. I touched her breasts, whispered, “Elma, I... didn't use.... Have to be more careful from now on.”
“You don't have to worry,” she said gently. “Your wet-dream girl comes complete—I'm four months pregnant.”
For a minute the whole room was dead with shocked silence, then Elma began to cry—sullen, fierce, whispered sobs that hit me like dull punches.
I tried to kiss away her tears, tasting the bitter salt. I kept repeating, “Please, honey, stop crying... stop crying. It doesn't matter...”
“Should have told you before but... this was all so fast. I was fed up with things, and worry. You must think I've tricked you.”
“Elma, stop it. Get some sleep.”
“Now you feel sorry for me and...”
“Sure, I feel sorry as all hell. So what? Maybe that's a part of what we call love. Half the time I feel sorry for myself. But don't cry and don't worry. Tomorrow we'll straighten things out.”
“It isn't that simple.”
“Anything is simple when you have money. You'll get a divorce, we'll get married.”
“Marsh, because... You don't have to marry me.”
“I know I don't have to, but I want to marry you. Tomorrow we'll...”
“He wants the baby. I won't give it up. I won't!”
I tried to cover her mouth with a kiss, held her tenderly. “Sleep. Tomorrow, honey. Tomorrow we'll think it out, the two of us. I promise you this—nobody will take the baby away.”
“That's all I've been thinking about, losing the baby. Driving me half crazy that...”
“Tomorrow, Elma. Please try to sleep.”
And she did fall asleep in my arms and I lay there, staring at the darkness of this strange room, a bit surprised I didn't feel anything at all about the baby. Didn't feel especially happy or sad or trapped... I took it all for granted. It was truly a big New Year for me!
I reached across Elma to the bed table, lit one of her cigarettes, watching the smoke vanish in the darkness.
A baby!
A Baby.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR SOME STUPID REASON I thought of my ex-wife, Mary Jane. Her bright blonde hair making her face all the more shallow looking, wearing that worn houserobe she lived in, asking me, “But Marsh, why don't we have a baby? Is it my fault?”
“Nobody is to blame. We can't afford a kid anyway.”
“I'd simply die if I thought I was barren. Marsh, you're not fooling me, using something I don't know about?”
“Look, I don't do this alone, you know I'm not using anything. We just aren't having any. It isn't like ordering a pound of meat in a store.”
She'd start crying, the creepy way she had of bawling. “Now Marsh, don't you talk rough to me.”
Of course from the start I'd known marrying Mary Jane was a mistake. And I was using something—I'd read up about this wave-rhythm control and our relations were very mathematical, I was always counting from her last period to the square root of the next, or something. A baby.
I remembered my mother on her knees, moaning, “My baby, my baby,” and all of us standing around the drafty bedroom, staring at the dead baby on the iron cot. Us five kids, some of us full of youth's indifference to tragedy. My old man was there in his old, patched winter underwear, wailing. I got my older brother alone in the next room, asked, “What's he bawling about? Got more kids than he can feed now. Knocking them out like rabbits in...*
He smacked me across the face. He was eighteen. I had just turned thirteen, stunted, but already muscular and with big shoulders from shoveling manure in the fertilizing plant every day after school.
We were having a hell of a fight when my old man came out, cursed us. “This a time to fight? Stop it or I'll break both your necks.”
I looked at his thin body—even winter underwear hung on him—and I thought I could break his neck with no trouble if it ever came down to neck-breaking. He was under forty, should have been at his peak, but he'd put in over twenty-five years in the mill.
I had childish ideas about age then. Mom was thirty-three, a faded, skinny woman with sparse hair a mixture of sandy-blonde (like mine) and gray. To me she was an old woman. But one afternoon I was doing an errand and saw this big car draw up and this beautiful woman get out. She was something, all straight and slim, lovely red hair, and of course well dressed. Some kid said, “Know who that doll is, wife of one of the mill owners. The fat guy.”
The “fat guy” was a big man, over six feet tall, and almost as wide around the belly. But an old man. I stared at this pretty girl, asked, “What'd he do, rob the cradle? She isn't over eighteen.”
“Listen to you—eighteen! Don't be dumb, she's going on thirty-seven.”
“Thirty-seven—you're balmy.”
“I know. I was working at the newspaper last month when she had herself a fancy birthday party, and there was talk about giving her age or not.”
And Mom was younger than her and looked like the girl's mother!
See, not knowing any better, I didn't mind the shack we lived in, the row on row of company shacks in the company street, the company store. Despite the poverty around us, we kids had fun. But now I realized what the mill did to you, what it had taken out of Mom. I made up my mind to escape before I started looking as old as Pop.
Mom and Pop are still down there, still working—taking it. Never even think of asking out. They're caught too firmly.
I was the first kid in our family to graduate public school. My older brothers were against any more school, but I was too small and young-looking to work in the mill. It was agreed I might try one term in high school. Although small, I was the strongest kid in town, and when the gym teacher saw me in shorts, he told me to try out for the football team.