“Yes, ma’am. He—” She pushed Robert and began to laugh. “We came out of Peoples and he wouldn’t let me have none a the umbrella. He let me get wet, so I took the umbrella and let him have some of his own medicine.”
Robert said nothing. He was standing out of the range of the umbrella and he was getting soaked all over again.
“We gonna get married, Miss Jenny,” she said, as if that explained everything, and she stuck out her hand with her ring. “From Castleberg’s,” she said. Miss Jenny took Clara’s hand and held it close to her face.
“Oh oh,” she said again and again, pulling Clara’s hand still closer.
“This Robert,” Clara said. “My”—and she turned to look at him—“fiancé.” She uttered the word with a certain crispness: It was clear that before Robert Morgan, fiancé was a word she had perhaps never uttered in her life.
Robert and Miss Jenny shook hands. “You gonna give her double pneumonia even before she take your name,” she said.
The couple learned the next week that the place above Miss Jenny was vacant and the following Sunday, Clara and Robert, dressed as if they had just come from church, were at her front door, inquiring about the apartment.
That was one of the last days in the park for them. Robert came to believe later that the tumor that would consume his wife’s brain had been growing even on that rainy day. And it was there all those times he made love to her, and the thought that it was there, perhaps at first no bigger than a grain of salt, made him feel that he had somehow used her, taken from her even as she was moving toward death. He would not remember until much, much later the times she told him he gave her pleasure, when she whispered into his ear that she was glad she had found him, raised her head in that bed as she lay under him. And when he did remember, he would have to take out her photograph from the small box of valuables he kept in the dresser’s top drawer, for he could not remember her face any other way.
Clara spent most of the first months of her pregnancy in bed, propped up, reading movie magazines and listening to the radio, waiting for Robert to come home from work. Her once pretty face slowly began to collapse in on itself like fruit too long in the sun, eaten away by the rot that despoiled from the inside out. The last month or so she spent in the bed on the third floor at Gallinger Hospital. One morning, toward four o’clock, they cut open her stomach and pulled out the child only moments after Clara died, mother and daughter passing each other as if along a corridor, one into death, the other into life.
The weeks after her death Robert and the infant were attended to by family and friends. They catered to him and to the baby to such an extent that sometimes in those weeks when he heard her cry, he would look about at the people in a room, momentarily confused about what was making the sound. But as all the people returned to their lives in other parts of Washington or in other cities, he was left with the ever-increasing vastness of the small apartment and with a being who hadn’t the power to ask, yet seemed to demand everything.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he confessed to Miss Jenny one Friday evening when the baby was about a month old. “I know I can’t do this.” Robert’s father had been the last to leave him, and Robert had just returned from taking the old man to Union Station a few blocks away. “If my daddy had just said the word, I’da been on that train with him.” He and Miss Jenny were sitting at his kitchen table, and the child, sleeping, was in her cradle beside Miss Jenny. Miss Jenny watched him and said not a word. “Woulda followed him all the way back home…. I never looked down the line and saw bein by myself like this.”
“It’s all right,” Miss Jenny said finally. “I know how it is. You a young man. You got a whole life in front a you,” and the stone on his heart grew lighter. “The city people can help out with this.”
“The city?” He looked through the fluttering curtain onto the roof, at the oak tree, at the backs of houses on K Street.
“Yes, yes.” She turned around in her chair to face him fully. “My niece works for the city, and she say they can take care of chirren like this who don’t have parents. They have homes, good homes, for chirren like her. Bring em up real good. Feed em, clothe em, give em good schoolin. Give em everything they need.” She stood, as if the matter were settled. “The city people care. Call my niece tomorra and find out what you need to do. A young man like you shouldn’t have to worry yourself like this.” She was at the door, and he stood up too, not wanting her to go. “Try to put all the worries out your mind.” Before he could say anything, she closed the door quietly behind her.
She did not come back up, as he had hoped, and he spent his first night alone with the child. Each time he managed to get the baby back to sleep after he fed her or changed her diaper, he would place her in the crib in the front room and sit without light at the kitchen table listening to the trains coming and going just beyond his window. He was nineteen years old. There was a song about trains that kept rumbling in his head as the night wore on, a song his mother would sing when he was a boy.
The next morning, Saturday, he shaved and washed up while Betsy Ann was still sleeping, and after she woke and he had fed her again, he clothed her with a yellow outfit and its yellow bonnet that Wilma Ellis, the schoolteacher next door, had given Betsy Ann. He carried the carriage downstairs first, leaving the baby on a pallet of blankets. On the sidewalk he covered her with a light green blanket that Dr. Oscar Jackson and his family up the street had given the baby. The shades were down at Miss Jenny’s windows, and he heard no sound, not even the dog’s barking, as he came and went. At the child’s kicking feet in the carriage he placed enough diapers and powdered formula to last an expedition to Baltimore. Beside her, he placed a blue rattle from the janitor Jake Horton across the street.
He was the only moving object within her sight and she watched him intently, which made him uncomfortable. She seemed the most helpless thing he had ever known. It occurred to him perversely, as he settled her in, that if he decided to walk away forever from her and the carriage and all her stuff, to walk but a few yards and make his way up or down 1st Street for no place in particular, there was not a damn thing in the world she could do about it. The carriage was facing 1st Street Northeast, and with some effort — because one of the wheels refused to turn with the others — he maneuvered it around, pointing toward North Capitol Street.
In those days, before the community was obliterated, a warm Myrtle Street Saturday morning filled both sidewalks and the narrow street itself with playing children oblivious to everything but their own merriment. A grownup’s course was generally not an easy one, but that morning, as he made his way with the soundless wheels of the carriage, the children made way for Robert Morgan, for he was the man whose wife had passed away. At her wake, some of them had been held up by grownups so they could look down on Clara laid out in her pink casket in Miss Jenny’s parlor. And though death and its rituals did not mean much beyond the wavering understanding that they would never see someone again, they knew from what their parents said and did that a clear path to the corner was perhaps the very least a widow man deserved.
Some of the children called to their parents still in their houses and apartments that Robert was passing with Clara’s baby. The few grownups on porches came down to the sidewalk and made a fuss over Betsy Ann. More than midway down the block, Janet Gordon, who had been one of Clara’s best friends, came out and picked up the baby. It was too nice a day to have that blanket over her, she told Robert. You expectin to go all the way to Baltimore with all them diapers? she said. It would be Janet who would teach him — practicing on string and a discarded blond-haired doll — how to part and plait a girl’s hair.