She left home one day in late spring. She had turned eighteen the week before. A woman wrapped in dirty tatters leaned against one of the cathedral arches, muttering and occasionally, sharply, calling out the word “Father!” like a curse. Franckline had spent nearly all of her money on a series of tap-taps to the city, and she had no place to stay. She had thought, foolishly, that she could sleep in a park or behind the Presidential Palace unmolested, but the eyes and gait of the men on the street made her understand that this was not so. Now, about 10:00 PM, a man approached her and said he had a room for the night, did she need one? She suspected what sort of payment this might involve but she was panicky and hungry and she was already, in the mind of those she had left behind, spoiled. Would it matter so much? But before she could rise to join the man, Bernard was there, telling the man to Al fè rout ou, to leave his sister alone. The man shrugged skeptically and moved away. Like a bad spirit he vanished into the dark. Bernard asked Franckline if she wanted something to eat, and bought her a large plate of goat fritay from a street vendor. She supposed he might be merely another, cleaner, version of the man who had offered her the room, particularly after he said she couldn’t stay out like this for the night, he would take her to his mother. But she didn’t think so. His eyes didn’t seem to have the same narrowed appraisal in them. His gentleness did not appear to be a fraud.
He did in fact take her to his mother, not far from the center of the city. She was a tall woman with glasses and a commanding air. She served Franckline — aware that she had not bathed for two days — spiced cocoa and fresh pineapple, and Bernard talked about Miami and New York, both cities he had studied in; he planned to go into banking or finance. He described the snow in the north, where they had family, how surprisingly light it was when you scooped it into your hands. And yet it was heavy enough to make roofs tumble down. He did not talk about how, within days, it blackened and crusted on the sidewalks and turned into gray slush in the streets. Franckline discovered that only once she was in Brooklyn herself. The banks that grew up by the sides of the road frightened her; she found it sinister the way they buried lost things, items revealed only months later: a doll’s arm, a stamped envelope, a child’s pair of pants. When Franckline passed by those banks, all she could think of was the refuse hidden inside.
She did not believe Bernard had omitted the snow’s despoilation to make a better story, to entice her. More likely he simply did not think of it. What mattered was the beauty life presented you with; ugliness was incidental, transient. The essence of snow was to be beautiful; therefore, in all of Bernard’s stories about snow, it was beautiful. Bernard’s mother showed Franckline where she could bathe, and put her to bed in sheets that were wonderfully stiff and clean. In the morning there was hot coffee and fresh bread and eggs. Bernard had already left for his job delivering crates of cereals and soap.
A knock on the labor room door, but the one who knocked doesn’t wait, opens the door and strides in. It is a tall, broad, youngish man in a dark overcoat dusted, like his hair, with snow, snow that seems to have tumbled right out of Franckline’s recollections to moisten his nose and eyebrows. He strides past Franckline toward Lore. He is carrying an enormous white stuffed panda with a store tag still dangling from one ear. He stops abruptly and turns back to Franckline.
“Judith Cooley’s room?” he asks. “I thought this was Judith Cooley’s room?”
On the bed Lore is holding her gown together with one hand, with the other arranging it to cover her thighs. Franckline steps between her and the man to better block her from his view.
“Check with the charge nurse,” she says briskly. “Out the door and back to your right, the big desk.”
“Coming up at four: Laura Bush’s top barbecue recipes!”
“I’m her brother,” says the man, not moving, as if hoping that by staying longer he can lessen his blunder. “I just drove in from Rochester.”
“That’s all right,” says Franckline. Go! she thinks. “Down the hall to your right and talk to Marina.”
Lore watches the panda (WELCOME BABY, its white T-shirt had read) bob out of sight and disappear; the door closes with a resounding bang. She curls onto her side, her knees drawn up, her fists tensed against her belly, the obstructing cords from the fetal monitor enraging her. She’d thought for a moment … there was that familiar-looking black wool coat, a familiar height and dark hair; she’d believed for a moment … she will not say it! But her thoughts betray her. Asa. Asa with his arms full of childish whimsy; Asa whom she had forbidden to see her again. The man had stood there; she had felt the shock of familiarity in her belly and her groin; her heart had moved with giddy velocity toward his figure.
She curls over the baby, protecting it from her deranged vision, apologizing: A mistake, my little one, a momentary fit, he is not good enough for you, not good enough for us, and he is never coming anyhow, and we do not need him, we do not need him!
And the baby moves within her, pressing, replying: Get up, get up! For I am coming! For the baby does not care about him. It has nothing to do with him, nor with her, either, not really, not now. It has only one task, to press forward. It cannot help it. It will tear her if it must. It will, if it needs to, freeze a mouth and an eye.
The pressure in her pelvis expands. And there, by the bed, before Lore has said anything, or is even aware that she has made a sound, stands Franckline. The nurse props her up and she leans over the pillows now stacked at the foot of the bed, which do just what Franckline promised. They take the weight off her dangling wrists and hands and allow her to feel almost gravityless, to concentrate on the only facts that matter: the prying-open of the exit to her womb and the heavy weight of Franckline’s hands. Franckline massages her back, her strong thumbs pushing into the narrow pockets around Lore’s spine and into her sacrum, the pain of this pressure breaking up the pain coming from within. Her throat loosens to let out more voice.
“… biggest feet in the universe …”
“… I can top that one …”
Lore’s growls drown out the television voices, render the action on the screen pantomime. The figures on the couches laugh, flap, lean toward and away from each other. They perform for nobody. But when Lore is silent again, their conversation rises and swoops into the room. “Well, I’d never let my husband …”
“Could you turn off the TV?” Lore asks. Franckline picks up the remote and gives the TV a zap. The shiny women and the smooth man vanish.
It was a full minute, Franckline tells Lore. Lore should be proud of herself. The nurse takes a chance and strokes the girl’s forehead. While attending to Lore, her own pain disappeared. Perhaps she had indeed imagined it.
Lore’s forehead is hot; her stomach churns threateningly. The sensation gradually passes, and her eyes flutter closed. In a couple of minutes she wakes, feeling calm. She turns her head. Franckline is sitting quietly by the bed, her hands folded. Lore fixes on the nurse’s cross, a small gold piece hanging from a gold chain. She again has the impulse to ask Franckline about herself but she is tired, she thinks she won’t be able to listen, and besides, stories are too hard, are almost always convoluted and do not tell the thing you really want to know. What she wants to know is what Franckline does in the moments when she despairs. Does she ever despair? Surely — that cross — she prays, and praying is something Lore does not believe in, or even know how to do.