Читать книгу Up the Hill to Home - Jennifer Bort Yacovissi - Страница 17

Evening, Passion Sunday,

16 April 1933

Ferd, in his outrage at being dismissed from Lillie’s bath, is at the staircase before he hears the baby crying. He circles back to pick Tommy up in time to avert the eruption of a full-body wail. With the bathroom occupied, Ferd has no choice but to leave the full diaper, unrinsed, in Emma’s chamber pot.

Downstairs in the parlor, the children have been firmly instructed to find something quiet to do. The older ones are reading, listening to the big radio, and completing schoolwork. Francie is having Dorothy read out loud, and is helping her to sound out unfamiliar words, while Jeanie naps curled up on the sofa with her ragdoll Sally, comforted by the lingering scent of her mother. Ferd interrupts Margaret’s reading, another weepy romance novel, and deposits Tommy with her.

In the kitchen, Charley is just putting the leftovers in the icebox to be available for Sunday supper, which is always an informal event. He inherits today’s meal cleanup when Emma disappears upstairs. Ferd takes over the last of it, freeing Charley finally to pull up his chair at the kitchen table with the Post, Herald, and Star. He chuckles over some pointless little senatorial scandal as Ferd finally joins him at the table, sitting heavily.

Charley looks up from his paper. He doesn’t need to witness the episode to know what’s happened: the four of them have lived together in the same house for sixteen years, and the addition of a new child every eighteen months has done nothing to dampen the hostilities. Early on, Charley knows, Ferd gives it his best, but Emma, a self-contained force of nature, is implacable from first to last. Charley is a neutral party, incapable by nature of being drawn in and fully unwilling to take sides. But it pains him to see the toll that it takes on Ferd, who almost always comes out on the short side of any skirmish, and on Lillie, the prize for whom the war is being fought.

He is fully re-engaged with his paper when Emma comes back in. Wordless, she sets about putting the kettle on, slicing bread, and putting the toaster on the stove. While she’s in the pantry, Ferd pushes up from the table and walks out of the room.

He is sitting on the sofa, narrating a picture book to Jeanie, who is still groggy and snuggled in his lap, when Emma appears in the doorway carrying the tea tray. “Take this upstairs.”

Ferd looks at her for a long moment, then kisses Jeanie on the top of her head as he picks her up and sits her down on the other side of Francie in order to take the tray. He passes the secretary but then steps back, considering. He sets the tray on top of the memory box and smoothly lifts it all up, spilling nothing on his way back to the bedroom. Lillie lies against a bank of pillows that keeps her almost entirely upright, and her eyes open as he steps in. Ferd sets the box next to her on the bed and arranges the tray over her lap. He watches from the dressing stool as she drinks the hot tea, using its heat to warm her hands and soothe her throat. She dips the toast into her tea to soften it before taking bites.

She puts her head back against the pillows for a moment and smiles softly at him. “Thank you,” she says, a myriad of meanings encompassed in two simple words.

When she is finished with the tea, he moves the tray and sits down against the headboard next to her. She settles into his shoulder, then lifts her head to look at him. “Have you had any dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.”

She leans back into him again, closing her eyes. “Don’t you worry about me, dearest. I’ll be bright as a new penny in the morning.”

He sits back farther, feeling the warmth of her against him. He leans down to kiss the top of her head and linger for a moment, breathing in her natural fragrance. Unconsciously, he strokes her arm, and listens as her raspy breathing settles into the rhythm of sleep.

As an hour passes, and then another, Ferd drifts in and out of sleep himself, waking at changes in her breathing, which seem to him to become more labored as the time passes. But she remains asleep and he does not disturb her.

He is startled from a light doze by a spasm next to him. Her arm has flailed involuntarily as her own gasp for air pushes her completely awake. He snaps up in bed and put his hand up to support the back of her head, which she has tipped back to help open her airway. After four agonized gasps, she is able to calm her breathing into long deep pulls for air, each of which is exhaled with an audible rattle. She looks at him with something approaching alarm. “I think I do need the doctor.”

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Leo Cavanaugh, whose extended family sits down to Sunday dinner at seven o’clock, is just pushing back from the table when the telephone rings. It takes him less than thirty minutes to reach the house. Charley Beck stays downstairs with the children, while Ferd and Emma attend the doctor during his examination. Lillie is still working hard to breathe, but not gasping. Dr. Cavanaugh takes in the sometimes overlapping accounts of the day’s events, which help to direct his examination. He feels for the soundness of her bones, focusing on the ribs just as Lillie has done, but finds no obvious fractures. The makings of ugly bruises have already appeared on the backs of her arms and on her shoulder blades, and the knot on the back of her head is the size of a hen’s egg. It’s obvious that she landed squarely on her back. He checks her temperature and blood pressure, and uses his reflector to check that her pupils dilate and contract appropriately; she does not appear to have a concussion.