The Light of Luna Park Read online

  “I would.”

  He pretends to pout as I brush my teeth, the toothpaste sour after the juice. Jack’s cute act is pretty persuasive, but he ruins it with what he says next.

  “Too bad, since I heard that mornings are the best time to make mini Jacks or Stellas.”

  I spit my toothpaste violently into the sink and turn to Jack in exasperation. “Where on earth did you hear that? A television ad for breakfast cereal?”

  “Sorry.” Jack puts his hands up as he backs away.

  I wince as I rinse my mouth. My tone was sharper than it needed to be. But Jack should have known better than to bring up babies on a day like today. I was reluctant to have kids before my mother died; now that she’s gone, I don’t know how I could possibly become a mother myself.

  The kids at school are enough for me. They’re practically too much for me. When I decided to be a teacher, it was because I appreciated the way kids were so honest and fresh. I thought I could help little girls like me keep their voices as they grew older, not try to quash them like most every teacher I’d ever had. I never planned on taking this job in special education—special education hardly existed when I was in school—but that was all that was available here for a newlywed. And Jack couldn’t bear to move to the city after the war; he wanted to stay somewhere familiar: the place he’d always called home, the place we’d both gone to college. Slow, suburban Poughkeepsie. Maybe I’d understand better if I knew what he saw in France—but no. God forbid he confide in his wife.

  I haven’t returned to the city since my mom’s funeral, either. Jack is afraid of its noises: the bomb threats from anarchists and terrorists, the roar of trains like the roar of artillery. I am afraid of its memories. We’re selling the old apartment—where I grew up, and where my mom spent the last five years of her life alone—in February, and Jack helped me arrange for it to be cataloged and cleared by a company in the city. I can’t bear to do it myself.

  I sigh as I stare into the mirror. Blue smudges the space below my eyes, and I massage them gingerly. It’s not that I don’t love my students. I do. But I’m not trained to teach them, and it shows. They’re run as ragged as I am. Some days, I have to grit my teeth and force myself to walk to the school building in the morning, because I know that nothing will be easy once I’m there. It’s not the kids that make me drag my feet, though—it’s the principal.

  The principal. Today is the final day before Christmas break, and while I’d normally be relieved to have a vacation, the end of this semester is different.

  My hands start to shake as I twist my hair into rolls, remembering the strange smirk on Principal Gardner’s face after our confrontation over supplies two weeks ago. The fight had been long overdue; in our basement classroom, I have eight desks for eleven kids, three reading primers, four notebooks. God only knows what possessed me to suffer in silence for a year and a half; it shouldn’t have taken my kids fighting over a pair of scissors and nearly stabbing their eyes out for me to demand a change.

  Whether it was really the scissors, the exhaustion, or the grief over my mom, I don’t know. But whatever it was, I locked the steel scissors in a drawer two weeks ago today and marched straight up to the principal’s office. Channeling all my fury at Gardner and the universe, I gave the principal an ultimatum. If he didn’t provide me with at least the basics by the end of the semester, he’d lose me.

  I’d returned home exultant, sure I’d have a well-stocked classroom in two weeks’ time, but Jack was more hesitant. He was afraid I’d been rash, acted out of grief rather than reason. But I know Gardner, and he won’t do anything to make his life harder. Where on earth would he find another woman willing to teach the very same kids that the rest of the district sought to abandon? He’ll never fire me.

  At least, I hope not. My hope is tempered with nerves now that the day is finally here. The fact that it’s the three-month anniversary of my mom’s death only compounds my anxiety, and it was foolish of me not to realize earlier what the date would be. But then, I haven’t been thinking clearly.

  I hate myself for wondering if Jack could be right after all.

  He inches back into the bathroom now, briefcase in hand. “I’m sorry for upsetting you, honey. Good luck with Gardner today.”

  “Thanks.” I look back at the lumpy pancakes and smile gently. It’s not Jack’s fault that I’m not like the other women we graduated with, many of whom have already replaced work with children. It’s just that I want to make the world a better place before I bring kids into it; I always have. “I think it will be good.”

  I’m trying to convince myself as much as I am him. I want my rashness to have helped my kids, not condemned them; I want to see their faces shining with delight when they return to a classroom in January stocked with colorful world maps, construction paper, books, and more.

  Jack gives me a peck on the cheek as he goes, and I wave. As I finish getting ready, my thoughts remain on the things I love about my job: the hugs, the smiles, the constant busyness that keeps my mind from returning to the hole left by my mother’s death.

  Her dying left not just an emotional hole but a physical one, too. I no longer pick up the telephone to call my mom every weekend. That stiff pillow that only my mom found comfortable lies unused in our guest room. The kitchen cabinets are a mess, Mom being the only one who ever bothered to organize them. It took me five minutes to find paprika the other day.

  Now, I root through the messy pantry for bread, check it to make sure it’s still good, and smear it with peanut butter to take with me for lunch. It’s time to go.

  “Wish me luck, Mom.” I look up at the ceiling and march out to meet the day.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Althea Anderson, July 1926

  I cannot speak to Cybil’s mother as I check her vitals. I chose not to speak when I could have pleaded, commanded, convinced. I cannot find it in me to make conversation after the fact.

  But the woman is desperate to talk. “We named her after my mother,” she offers, “Cybil.”

  “She was beautiful,” I murmur. And she was. I only wish I could think about the little girl’s splendor without also thinking of her death. Without hating Dr. Bricknell for letting it happen.

  And without hating myself. The poor mother’s grief pierces me as if it were my own. One moment she is sobbing, her speech so desperate and rushed that even my trained ears can only pick out the occasional word: baby, hope, room, grandchild, love, why. Again and again, why—a question I don’t want to answer. The mother sobs and gasps and babbles and then, as if a switch has flipped, stops. Like Cybil’s life, here and then suddenly snuffed out. And then the mother is back to tripping over her words, picking up speed before another inevitable stumble.

  The father is the opposite. He doesn’t string together meaningless words or stammer. He doesn’t open his mouth at all. No stories, no questions, no tears. Instead, he shrinks into the corner and stands as still as his daughter’s lifeless body. Not even his face moves, and each time I shift my gaze from his wife to make a note, I see his eyes staring wide. I know that, even wide open, they don’t see me. They don’t see me or his wife in bed or the hospital room.

  All they see is Cybil, and I can’t help but wonder whether those eyes could have one day looked at Cybil as a child, a teenager, a young adult—if not for my silence.

  If I, who have taken the nurse’s pledge to devote myself to those committed to my care, had spoken.

  But I didn’t.

  I let that sweet girl die.

  * * *

  —

  I dream of Cybil for weeks. Sometimes she is reproachful, tiny fists flying. Other times, she is broken, eye-droplet tears leaking from heavy-lidded eyes. And occasionally, she is kind. In these dreams, she shoots into girlhood, cheeks flaming with health. “I forgive you.” She smiles to reveal straight, white teeth, and I wake up sobbing. The idea of what Cy
bil would have been, the thought of forgiveness undeserved—no more exquisite torment exists. And I fear that this particular torment will plague me for eternity.

  July 5, I nearly miss my morning shift at the hospital. Not because I am sleeping off any Independence Day revelry; in fact, I am not sleeping at all. I woke at four a.m. unable to return to unconsciousness, and though I’ve escaped the dreams, wakefulness is not much better. Sitting alone at the table in the downstairs parlor, I watch Cybil in my mind’s eye as she transforms into my own mother. I cannot judge the accuracy of the image; the whole of my recollection of my mother flows from one solemn portrait: dark hair, dark eyes, body encased in the high-necked ruffles of her era. She could be anyone. I know nothing of my mother, thanks to the cruelest of all life’s ironies: that it was my introduction to the world that forced her out of it. My birth that caused her death. At least she and my father are reunited again, I tell myself. Since my father’s death two years ago, I’ve been alone—but I try to comfort myself with the knowledge that my parents are together.

  It never works. My worn, well-traveled thoughts trap me in amber. Cybil and my mother, dying as I stand silently by. Though my father never spoke of my mother’s death, I remain horribly capable of imagining its various incarnations: slow, sudden, desperate, angry. Never do I picture her peaceful; always, her face is contorted as she gazes down at the daughter that has killed her. At me.

  Those twisted lips and pained eyes are all I can see when Ida, a fellow nurse in residence here at 26th Street, rouses me from my stupor. “Thank you,” I murmur as I run upstairs to grab my coat. Ida, with her flushed cheeks and unruly hair, is always the last nurse to sprint into Bellevue in the morning. Though I am typically the first, I barely make it today.

  Once I do arrive at the hospital, I am restored to myself. Busy hands keep the guilt at bay as I fetch tools, check mothers’ vitals, and study reports to summarize for the doctors.

  At eleven a.m., Dr. Bricknell calls the head nurse and me in to assist with a premature labor. Working in obstetrics this term has been my greatest joy, however incongruent with my past it appears. Perhaps I feel that I can pay back my own debt to my parents by aiding others—or that’s the motivation my father ascribed to my work before he died, anyway. Though I could have chosen it for a love of blood and corpses, and my father wouldn’t have stopped me. For him, what mattered was the relief that I was out of his house. If I had a career, he reasoned, he didn’t need to confront my face every morning: the face that both resembled his wife’s and stole her from him.

  Fitting that the inheritance he left me, however small, has funded my nursing education. It’s why I’m able to be here doing what I’ve always wanted so desperately to do: assisting the doctors in delivering babies safely, saving them and their mothers.

  I turn to the young woman in the hospital bed. Hattie, the head nurse has informed me. Due in September, her baby is ten weeks early. But now is not the time to point out the complications that may arise. Instead, I smile reassuringly at the woman as I squeeze her delicate fingers.

  “But he has been kicking,” the mother assures me, as if I’d told her he was not. “He kicked all night.” Her voice verges on hysteria. “He’s strong,” she insists. “He’s healthy.” The poor woman’s blond curls bounce with conviction. As if a firm enough belief can disrupt the course of nature.

  But when the baby arrives, she—not he, as Hattie had predicted—is not breathing.

  “Ice water,” Dr. Bricknell commands, his calm steadying my hands as I obey. I pass him the tub, and he plunges a silent child, red marks on her head where the forceps grasped it, into the water and pulls out a wailing one.

  “He’s alive!” Hattie cries. “Alive!”

  But Dr. Bricknell’s words are grim as he peers over my shoulder. I am weighing her: 1,133 grams. Two pounds and a half, and drops of water still clinging to her, too. “Bring in the father,” Dr. Bricknell commands. “This may be his only chance to meet his daughter.”

  “Daughter?” Hattie interrupts.

  “Daughter,” I confirm.

  “Oh,” Hattie falters. “Oh.” But then a smile spreads across her face again. “Margaret, then.”

  Once both parents are in the room, Dr. Bricknell gives them the grim news. “She’s too small to survive.”

  Hattie’s face contorts, and for a moment I see Cybil’s older, dark-haired mother in her place. No matter that Hattie’s hair falls in golden ringlets around her unlined face and the other woman’s brown hair was lank and straight; no matter that Hattie is shapely and youthful while Cybil’s mother was thin and drawn. A mother’s grief is universal.

  But Hattie’s grief isn’t inevitable.

  “Yes, she’s too small to survive.” I repeat Dr. Bricknell’s statement but add a qualifier. “Too small to survive here.”

  The head nurse snaps her eyes in my direction as if to scare me into silence. For once, I ignore her.

  “What do you mean?” His voice cold, Hattie’s husband responds to my claim but keeps his eyes trained on Dr. Bricknell. I avoid looking the same way as I speak.

  “We don’t have incubators here, but there’s a doctor at Coney Island who does. There’s no guarantee that your daughter will survive if we take her, but there’s a chance. Here, she doesn’t even have that.”

  Hattie inhales. “Incubators? How do we—”

  Then the father’s voice, overpowering. “You’re suggesting that we put our daughter in a circus sideshow.”

  Dr. Bricknell turns toward me. “Yes, Nurse Anderson. I’d also like to know. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  I straighten my spine. “I’m suggesting we save her life.”

  “Do they work? The incubators?” Hattie interjects.

  “Sometimes,” Dr. Bricknell admits, though he sounds anything but happy about it. “Likely through chance rather than skill. The man at Coney Island is by many accounts a liar and a fraud. Not trained as I am.” He straightens.

  The baby’s father nods vigorously at the end of Dr. Bricknell’s little speech. “Yes, yes. And you”—he turns to me—“you want my daughter displayed alongside burlesque dancers? Fire-eaters? Midgets?”

  Cybil, Cybil, Cybil. Her name beats with a pulse stronger than that of this new baby’s heart. “The facility is quite separate from all that,” I promise the man, “just like a hospital.” I’m practically parroting the news article, and I pray it’s correct. I haven’t yet had a free day to go and see for myself. Not with these hours. “Trained nurses and doctors, sanitary conditions, the newest technology. Several babies sent from other hospitals are doing beautifully there.”

  “But it is entirely your choice.” Dr. Bricknell comforts the man before tossing a glare in my direction. Not yours, his pursed lips tell me. Be. Quiet. The cardinal rule for nursing students: Tread carefully. Be quiet. And obey.

  My words are useless anyway. The father scoffs. “A hospital on Coney Island’s midway. Ha!”

  “Michael . . .” the wife speaks quietly.

  “No, Hattie. Our daughter is not a freak.”

  Hattie’s pale lashes cast spidery shadows as she peers down at her child. “No,” the woman whispers. “She’s not.”

  “It’s decided, then.” The man—Michael—turns to us. “We will follow God’s plan.” He emphasizes God as if we had suggested instead that he bargain with the devil himself for his daughter’s life. His words are eerily similar to Dr. Bricknell’s the day Cybil died as he continues. “Our daughter will not be exploited by a quack.”

  Silence. Michael is waiting for us to affirm his decision; I am waiting for Hattie to refute it. And—yes—she lifts her head from the damp pillow and opens her mouth. Thank God. Air whooshes from between my lips in relief. And then Hattie collapses back again, her mouth closing. I look to her husband and see why: his eyes are narrowed, and he is sending his wife the same messag
e Dr. Bricknell telegraphed to me just moments before. Not your decision. Be quiet. Obey.

  Like me, Hattie acquiesces. A tear leaks from her eye as she nods. The infant, poor sweet girl, is trembling. Even shriveled and pale, she possesses her mother’s beauty: big eyes, full lips, a pinprick nose.

  “Well.” Dr. Bricknell nods once, curtly, as if the situation is simply unavoidable. “We’ll give you a moment alone.”

  He whisks me into the hallway with the head nurse. “The nurse and I have another delivery to attend to.”

  I try not to let it sting, that he refers to her as “the” nurse like I’m not one, too.

  “I assume it goes without saying that you don’t open your mouth again as you do what you can to keep the girl comfortable. And then?” He waits to be sure my eyes are locked on his. “Up to the director to decide whether you still graduate, but you’re off obstetrics.” And away he goes, spinning on his heel and leaving his words swirling in my head. Off obstetrics.

  No. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll talk to the director, argue my case, do an extra round in surgery or emergency . . .

  Stop, Althea. Planning may be my way to cope, but I don’t have time for it now. No time for list writing when a baby is dying in the next room. Losing my job means nothing if I don’t use my job to save lives while I still have it.

  I stride back into the delivery room, masking my panic as urgency. “I’m going to find the baby a hot water bottle to warm her skin.” I let Hattie kiss her daughter’s forehead before I take her and wrap her in a blanket and Hattie grips my wrist. The strength of her grasp surprises me, her body limp and coated in sweat. “Margaret.” She whispers her daughter’s name like the girl has stolen her voice.

  “Margaret,” I repeat as the girl and I slip from the room. Her round eyes stare fearfully into mine.

  “Oh.” The word drops from my mouth like a tear.