Part 1 (2/2)
”Do we get to play with him?” Ethel asked, fingering the strap on her camera.
Martha scowled. ”When it's your week to live in the practice house, you will of course prepare for and give all his feedings, including the ones in the middle of the night. You will take him outdoors for walks, maintain his crib and carriage bedding, bathe him, shampoo him, weigh and measure him, soak and wash his diapers-”
”Wash his diapers!” Grace said in horror.
”Wash. His. Diapers,” Martha repeated. She looked at the six women one by one, trying to make sure they were listening. ”Taking care of a baby,” she said, ”is the only important job that most of you will ever have.”
ONLY BEATRICE HAD BROUGHT A NOTEBOOK, and while the girls resumed their places on the armchairs and sofa, she clutched it as if it was a kickboard and she was just learning to swim. A few years back, Martha mused, she had taught another kid like this. Dumb as a spoon. Nervous as a fish. ”Do we need to take notes?” Beatrice asked now, dropping her pen.
”Who didn't bring a notebook?” Martha asked. Hands sprang up in unison, as if the girls were here not for a cla.s.s but for a swearing-in.
NOT EVERYONE WHO STUDIED HOME ECONOMICS at the practice house was completely incompetent, in Martha's view. But even some of the most basic skills-like sterilizing a pacifier, say, without cloaking the place in the smell of burning rubber-seemed at times to tax the students' capabilities. Martha had grown up the child of an Army captain, and inefficiency bothered her almost as much as carelessness did. She understood that her growing inability to hide her impatience was the main reason that Dean Swift, the head of the Department of Home Economics, and President Gardner had insisted she take her sabbatical. And that Carla Peabody, the insipid young college nurse, had gotten to run the practice house in her absence. And that Martha had spent most of the previous few weeks trying to eradicate the last traces of her.
Other than the previous year, that had been the only time when the leaders of the college had intruded into Martha's life. She was determined that they would not do so again, and yet the shameful reality-so completely at odds with her character and the impression she usually gave-was that she was as perfectly vulnerable to their wishes as a baby like Henry was to hers.
AT 12:45, WHILE MARTHA was still demonstrating bottle sterilization and formula preparation, Henry woke up, yelling. Martha had to suppress a smile as she watched the looks of fear pinch and pull at the girls' faces. Within seconds, both Connie and Betty were on their feet, and Beatrice had dropped her pen again.
”He's crying!” Ethel said.
”Yes,” Martha replied languidly.
”Shouldn't we-” Connie began.
”Shouldn't you what?” Martha said.
”Shouldn't we go pick him up?” Connie asked, brandis.h.i.+ng her paperback Spock. ”Spock says-” she began.
Martha squared her shoulders and fingered the gold honor society pin she always wore on a chain beneath her scarf: Omicron Nu, the home economics sisterhood that was the only group to which Martha had ever belonged.
”There is no textbook for this course,” Martha said. ”If there were a textbook for this course, it would not be Spock.”
Connie looked contrite, then concerned. ”What's wrong with Spock?” she asked.
”Now. What time did I say his nap would end?” Martha replied.
Henry's cries were rising in primal rhythms now, and there were gasps between his calls, a forlorn, slightly desperate sound that even Martha, if she were honest, would have to admit she would rather not hear.
”You told us one o'clock,” Beatrice said.
”It's nearly one!” Connie added.
”If you don't train him now, you can't train him later,” Martha replied, and so, for the next thirteen minutes, until precisely one o'clock, seven women stood in the kitchen, listening to Henry House cry, watching the minute hands on their watches crawl toward the refuge of the hour.
”NOW?” CONNIE ASKED at one.
”Now,” Martha said, and, despite herself, she led the way a little too eagerly back into the nursery.
Henry had managed to come unswaddled, and his face was nearly as red as his cotton pajamas. He did not stop crying when Martha picked him up, or when she changed his diaper, or even when she carried him, up on her shoulder, to the rocking chair. Only when she had guided the bottle firmly into his mouth did Henry stop. There was a kind of collective loosening in the room then, like the relief that follows a storm after the lights have been restored.
IT WAS AFTER HIS MEAL-eight ounces of formula exactly, drained to the last drop-and after the lesson in burping-over the shoulder, then over the knee-that Henry House was briefly returned to his crib, his backside naked, and that Ethel took the photograph they would all carry in their wallets. For although these women were present, on this September morning, to begin their education in the science of child rearing and the science of home economics, there was nothing in the least bit scientific about the feelings already engendered in them by this winsome, brown-haired, dark-eyed, sweet-cheeked baby boy.
2.
Six Different Lullabies
Like the other academic disciplines at Wilton College, the Department of Home Economics required a four-year commitment from its students, and a course load as heavy as that of any department on campus. Despite the a.s.sumptions it inevitably provoked, home ec had for decades been a quietly subversive portal to a traditionally male world. In the name of home maintenance, menu planning, and stain removal, students took mandatory courses in physics, chemistry, statistics, bacteriology, biology, nutritional a.n.a.lysis, and electrical circuitry. At the end of one course, called Household Equipment, every girl was required to dismantle and rea.s.semble an entire refrigerator by herself. This was no sorority tea.
Yet in the buzz of postwar enthusiasm, as the Baby Boom began in the reclaimed bedrooms of three million couples, the cooking, cleaning, and household maintenance seemed to take a backseat to the child-care course. It was the practice house, with its tiny, living embodiment of a great American future, that seemed to draw from the students the most somber sense of purpose. When Connie came for the first day of her first week as practice mother, her s.h.i.+ny red shoes were the only suggestion that she would ever bring anything light or fun-anything but grave ambition and patriotic intensity-to the tasks involved in helping to raise a fine young American.
Martha did nothing to perk up the mood. In her nineteen years as head of the practice house, she had trained more than fifty student mothers. But she had yet to find one who didn't need sober reminding that the joys of tending a child should never be separated from the risks.
With Connie, Martha did what she had always done for a novice on day one. She commented on the weather, took the girl's jacket, gave her an encouraging smile, thrust the baby into her arms, and said she had something to attend to upstairs.
It was a necessary initiation. The deep end of the pool, the rudder of the sailboat, the wheel of the car. All those situations that ultimately had to be handled by one person alone. There could never be any true preparation. Just defeat or survival.
Of course in this case it was Henry's survival that was the initial concern. Henry, who had tightened his tiny fist around Martha's index finger this morning and brought it directly into his mouth, as if it were his own thumb. Maybe it was his size-so much smaller than the usual practice babies-that made him seem more vulnerable. But in all the years she been running the practice house, Martha had lost only one baby, and that one had been her own: a tiny, awful, unbeautiful thing, born dead and b.l.o.o.d.y and premature, a hundred seasons ago, on a winter night when she'd still been loved.
Martha saw herself in the mirror at the top of the stairs and readjusted her scarf, forcing the memory out of her mind. Once a day. She allowed herself to think about that only once a day.
Like the first floor, the second floor of the practice house featured one small and one large bedroom, as well as an ample parlor. The rooms upstairs were as personal and crowded as the main floor's were generic and pristine. Martha had not yet found places for the souvenirs of her semesters away: pale pink sh.e.l.ls and bleached white coral from Bermuda, a woven blanket and a clay bowl from Mexico, the inevitable Statue of Liberty from New York. She surveyed them now with mixed feelings. It was true that she had seen many wondrous sights she would never have seen unless Dean Swift and Dr. Gardner had insisted she go. It was also true that those sights had made her miss the practice house more deeply, made her feel the peculiar imbalance of having a home in which one lived only at the pleasure of an inst.i.tution.
The many photographs framed on the walls upstairs were not of family, exactly, but rather of families formed and dissolved every few years: cla.s.ses of women with House babies, babies long since returned to the orphanage, long since adopted, long since renamed. On the rare occasions when their adoptive families brought them back to visit, they never remembered Martha anyway.
”Mrs. Gaines?” Martha heard Connie call. ”I think he may be-”
May be what, Martha thought, already fighting the same impatience that had led to her recent exile. There were really only a few options with a four-month-old baby. He could be hungry. Tired. Dirty. Hot. Cold. Sick. In pain. And that was all.
Martha checked her watch. It had been only ten minutes. She would give Connie five minutes more.
”I'm sure he's fine, dear,” Martha called, and then she sat at her desk and waited, ready to move only at the sound of a life-threatening disaster.
MARTHA GAINES IN HER TWENTIES had never once looked into a mirror with apprehension or dismay. She hadn't been striking, but she'd been pretty, her features a warm invitation: hazel eyes, ascendant cheekbones, upturned nose-all broad and Irish. It hadn't yet crossed her mind that she wouldn't find love, a husband, children, and, someday, a house of her own.
She had been twenty-five on the Christmas Eve when Tom Gaines, the baritone who'd been promised all week by the choir director, had loped into the church, late. Tom had been stocky and rugged-looking, with an unexpectedly tidy and debonair side part in his hair. His place among the baritones had been opposite Martha's among the altos. Their eyes had met three or four times that night, looking up on a hallelujah.
He was a maintenance man for the Pennsylvania Railroad, painting the bodies of locomotives in their signature dark green, maroon, and gold. Martha would have married him no matter what his job had been. He smelled of sweat and shaving cream, and he sang or hummed love songs, sometimes without even knowing it.
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