The Painted Table(9)
When a friendly neighbor invites Saffee to her son’s birthday party, Saffee cries and adamantly refuses to go. In front of the boy’s mother, for appearances’ sake, Joann briefly insists that Saffee should agree to go. But, of course, she cannot. The left-out mother has taught her daughter to be a left-out child. In her four years, she has never been in the company of other children.
It is no coincidence that one of their favorite songs goes:
Oh, little playmate, come out and play with me,
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree.
Look down my rain barrel,
Slide down my cellar door,
And we’ll be jolly friends, forevermore . . .
I’m sorry, playmate, I cannot play with you,
My dollies have the flu,
Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo . . .
To prepare for the baby, Joann and Saffee, holding hands, brave a cable car ride to a downtown department store. They return with infant clothing and diapers.
In late March, Joann feels cramping. It’s too soon. She telephones a San Francisco hospital for advice and a nurse tells her to go to bed and stay there. She is not reassured.
How can she manage? Who will buy groceries? She’s been concerned for some time about who will care for Sapphire when it’s time to go to the hospital by taxi. She knows instinctively that this is the kind of thing family is designed for. But she, like most all her sisters, had left the family the day after graduating from high school. Run away from home and each other. Blown to the wind. For Joann, and, she suspects, for the others also, by then it was too late to bond, to behave like a family. Joann had taken a bus to a new season, a fresh life in St. Paul that brought her a little fun, a husband, and a child. She had no intention of ever again communicating with family. Especially Maxine. Especially Rolf. But now, alone and afraid, she must think about them again.
Of the sisters, Dorothy, although imperious at times, had been the only sibling who was not exactly kind, but at least tolerant. She wrote Joann a couple of letters that she has kept but did not answer. She shuffles through her stationery box. Yes, the first one has a phone number.
Perhaps Dorothy will be willing to help. She knows how hard it is to have a husband in the Pacific; her George is an officer on the USS Ticonderoga. She is living, she wrote, with her two children, in the home of a cousin in Iowa for the duration of the war.
Hoping for a miracle, Joann calls and pleads with her to come. Dorothy, a more capable woman than Joann, agrees to leave her children for a short time in the care of the cousin and take the train to California. Until she arrives, Joann is beside herself. From her bed, she frets to Saffee, “You gave me twenty hours of hard labor, Saffee. I don’t know if I can go through that again.”
On a sunny spring day, Saffee watches out the window as her mother steps from a cab. The blanketed bundle in her arms is baby sister April. Aunt Dorothy carries the sleeping infant up the outer stairway as Joann relates that it was an easy birth, “compared to the first one.”
“Look, Saffee!” Joann gushes. “Look at the baby. See how tiny she is. Isn’t she beautiful?”
In the hospital, Joann wrote Nels the news. She tells Dorothy how she anticipates his surprise to learn he’s the father of two, a whole month earlier than expected. “He probably wanted a boy this time,” she says, “but I’m sure he’ll be happy with a girl.”
Joann places the sleeping infant on the bed and begins to unpack her small overnight bag. She thinks about her own father, recklessly sacrificing his wife’s health hoping to produce male farmworkers. She knows; she had been a secluded witness. Sometime later, of course, she had understood what was happening. Perhaps that was the night her mother began to grow a seed. A girl seed. The last one. Sometimes sounds of their struggle still replay in Joann’s mind, as do Clara’s pleas from that other night. “No, Knute! It will kill me if you give this baby away! It will kill me!”
At the remembrance, a tear threatens to slide from Joann’s eye. She quickly blinks it away so Dorothy doesn’t see. Their mother’s words had come true and explained what Joann read to be the cause of death on the certificate in the wooden box. Memorized words that have not diminished their foreboding.
Dorothy stays two more days. Joann is grateful for her help but cringes at the once-familiar caustic voice, characteristic of all her sisters. They share war information, scanty as it is, gleaned from their husbands’ letters. Joann learns that two kamikaze planes hit and seriously damaged George’s aircraft carrier three months earlier. Hundreds of men had been killed, burned in fires on deck, Dorothy tells her. “I’m so thankful that George was spared.”