The Professional Lover
As my own family had perished in 1935, after the dust storms and flood and heat that ruined Nebraska and everything I considered home, I took a chance on Frank’s mother and moved to Green City after I was sent home from the war because of my belly. All I knew was her name, Helen Hart, and her address, which brought me to apartment #2 in the House of Love. I imagine she was going through some terrible grieving, as I was, when I showed up pregnant, knocked on her door hugging a stack of envelopes against my chest, and said, “I’ve brought your letters. Frank wanted you to have them.”
She stopped drying her hands on her apron and put them on my stomach.
“It’s a girl!” she proclaimed, gently massaging the baby’s knees poking out beneath my ribs.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“And why wouldn’t she be?” Helen smiled. She was pretty, then, and locals swear she’s only gotten prettier with age. She was a redhead, same as Frank had been, with dark blue eyes and freckles splattered on her face and neck and arms. She wore a blue housedress that accentuated her hips and chest, and a red-and-white checkered apron embroidered with cherries. “Come in, come in,” she said. “My goodness, aren’t you a plump one!” I heard her take a breath and exhale before she took another and said, “Please don’t mind my asking, but how old are you, dear?”
“Thirty-seven,” I said, blushing. Frank was nineteen. A baby. Good for a good roll in the hay, as the kids call it now. Heathens, every one of them.
“I see,” she said. “I’m thirty-six.”
I nodded. “You Harts sure do start your loving early.”
She laughed and wrapped her arms around me, and for the next few hours we must have gone through some dozen handkerchiefs drying our eyes and telling stories about Frank, and I have cherished Helen for her friendship ever since she offered it to me that day. She never judged me for the relationship I had with her son. Not even when my water broke the next morning and doctors blamed the early labor on my age; she told them to go stuff themselves and thank God she was in charge of Joseph’s care instead of them. Not even when, after seeing him once, I refused to see him again and wouldn’t leave my bed in the maternity ward. She told me it was normal, that most parents of premature babies reacted as I did. The truth was I expected him to look like Frank, but he looked more like a monkey than anything human. The tubes and wires sticking out from his tiny hands and feet scared me worse than when I was in Italy and watched a medic wrap a tourniquet around Frank’s broken head.
So in return for these kindnesses, I never blamed her when she fell asleep while feeding him formula that spilled out of the bottle and into his mouth until there was so much it trickled from his lips and into his nose and lungs. She woke, saw first, then felt, the wet edges of the stocking cap she’d knitted to contain his warmth. She immediately performed CPR, but to no avail, and she was anguished. For two months she had provided him with a calm, steady presence. She had rarely left his side, his tiny crib. She monitored his every moment, regularly weighed him, collected urine, feces, and blood in order to properly manage his fluids. He was so weak, his lungs couldn’t exchange gases, so oxygen was pumped through a tube into his nose. For the first few weeks he was unable to take food by mouth. He received nutrients and vitamins intravenously through a small needle in his foot. Because his liver was not strong enough to break down bilirubin, he was put under artificial sunlight that broke it down for him. At the first hint of jaundice, he had a blood transfusion and Helen exchanged my good blood for his bad.