Puffed of cheeks, squinting, so rosy, Dr. Brumus dropped in to see patients—weekly. He stooped over the bloated faces on the sunporch, where the most sickly were aired. Their gowns, if wind-caught, arched like wings, though they were strapped to their cane chairs in case of seizure.
When Dr. Brumus was crossing from one building to another, he would sometimes look up to find me being shuffled from one building to another in a row of kids—we were always in rows. He gazed at me sadly.
Monthly, he called me into his office, patted my shoulder, and said, “Well, well. How are you, Harriet?” An obligation. My father, I assume, paid handsomely. He was probably one of the few who paid at all.
I don’t know when Dr. Brumus told me I had a father named Jack Wolf and a mother named Mary who suffered from nerves. He must have done so before I could understand, as it was simply always something I knew. There was never a shock, only acceptance of factuality. I knew they loved me, but were unable to care for me—or even, truly, to look upon me, a moron. The mere glance would break their dear, kind hearts.
My father, good old Jackie, had been right after all; I wasn’t fit. I suffered occasional mutism, especially in front of Dr. Brumus. I was a hysteric who often, under duress, would bleed from the nose. I didn’t yet have a menstrual cycle, but this was a concern. Dr. Brumus had Mrs. Funk keep tabs. They didn’t want me to start to bleed and simply fade away.
In his office, I could see sky from the window behind his large desk, and I would convince myself I was up there circling. This would calm me.
He told me my father was proud of my progress. He would sometimes ask, “Do you think of him?”
I nodded, but I had confused my father with God. Like God, my father was a concept, a fatherly being who didn’t actually appear.
Dr. Brumus noted things in my chart and sometimes he was inspired to commentary: “Good, good, you’re being responsive!”
I believed that God would look at everyone’s chart on the final day and He would judge the living and the dead.
I got my first notions of God from Mrs. Funk’s bedtime stories of how God had spared us: other ill children were locked away in basements and attics, the narrow cells of almshouses where maniacs were chained to walls, fed oats, refused sun, forced to bed down on straw, and abused by brutal keepers. She was trying to be kind, in her way.
“You’re lucky,” she told us while putting us to sleep in our rows of cots, stiff sheets, wool blankets that stunk of piss and feet. “You don’t know your parents and so you will better understand the love of God, directly bestowed upon you.” It was as if parents were mere interference. She sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” I remember the verses even now, down to the very last, my favorite:
Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud, and honor unto Christ the King,
This through countless ages men and angels sing.
Mrs. Funk was our singing angel. The high shine of her porcine cheeks! The faint warble of her voice! She loved us, I think, even if love was so foreign we didn’t know how to love her back or one another or ourselves.
As expected, the boys were rough. But the girls of Stump Cottage punched one another too, when the staff was absent, and resorted to stealthy pinches when the staff was present. My arms were splotched purple.
It’s impossible to be named Harriet Wolf and not be called a hairy wolf. I got it so often it became essential. A child trapped in a harsh childhood should be so lucky to have a nickname as vicious and strong as a hairy wolf. Worse things. When cornered, I growled.
The staff was overworked, harsh-tongued, even Mrs. Funk, and didn’t spare the rod, but I won’t detail the beatings or the vermin. There were always infestations. I feared things crawling into my mouth and my girl parts at night.
With fifty beds to a dormitory room, it was hard to sleep. The sickly wheezed, the traumatized screeched, and all of the patients were either sickly or traumatized or both. At their quietest, the halls echoed with labored breathing, coughing, gagging. One cry would lead to another and another and finally to a system of buzzers, wired throughout the building, to call the beleaguered staff.
The rise of panic from cries to buzzers to footsteps terrified me. My breath pinched in my throat; I feared that my nose would bleed—so much so that it usually did, and when I felt the first wet, warm tear of blood from my nostril, I was thankful. The pillow became damp as the red circle spread out around my head. If the lights flicked on, I was pulled from bed, my head yanked back, nose pinched tightly by a night warden—sometimes Mrs. Funk, sometimes another. I was marched to the bathroom to bleed over the rusted sink drain.
If undiscovered, I bled quietly, a surrender, the secret relief of it a pleasure. It must have been the same for children who pissed their rubber sheets—warm and predictable. Eventually, the bleeding stopped, and I slept in the wet comfort of my pillow. Maybe it recalled for me, in a deeply subconscious way, my first bloody sheets—my mother’s—where I was born or died, depending on when you heard the story.
But one morning I was sitting on the edge of my cot tying my shoes when I looked up to find Mrs. Funk’s face poised over mine—a lit bulb of a face, glowing with joy. I blinked into the light of that face.
She made the sign of the cross. “Oh, small Jesus!” she said. “Little Girl Jesus of the Dreaming Wounds!”
“What is it?” I said, trapped by Mrs. Funk’s adoring gaze.
She had me stand up. “A wreath of blood. Look.”
And there, on my pillow, was a halo dried stiff and brown like a crown of thorns above the smudged outline of my face.
“Little Girl Jesus!” she whispered again as the other children circled around. “Of the Dreaming Wounds!”
I wasn’t even really human so how could I understand this thin sliver of divinity? (We are all human and divine.)
She whispered, “This is from God, Harriet Wolf. You are from God.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said quietly, afraid to disagree with her.
She stripped the linens. “But a good Catholic needs no proof. Wash it away.” She shoved the sheets at me and sent me to the laundry in the Custodial Building for Girls.
Once in the open air, I felt foggy and smaller than I’d ever felt—small as a pinprick in a piece of paper.
I was a small girl Jesus. I was from God. This was my conception.
And then I stepped into the laundry and, for the first time, I saw Eppitt Clapp, amid sheets and shirts, starches billowing like the dust of willows. He was pink and shining in the gusts of hot air, the stink of lye. He was alone amid the frail wicker and canvas laundry baskets, the abandoned, rickety ironing boards, and he was cranking the wringer, a hefty machine that stood in the middle of the room like a large bony horse. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the tough knot of his small biceps. It had been raining, so the sheets and small dresses, pants, and shirts hung from indoor lines. The air was damp and hot. His shirt was pasted to his back, and he was aglow. We were the only ones there.
I coughed loudly; he lifted his head. “What do you want?” he asked.
This was the first time I’d ever wanted anything, though I had no name for the feeling. He looked at me across the large fogged room and I was made real—incarnate. It was as if I was being seen for the first time; this was my birth and I was silent, as I had been for my mother. Eppitt walked over and took the bloody sheets. “Are you the one from Stump Cottage?”
I nodded.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Never seen a boy in the laundry?” His eyelids fluttered with the hesitations in his speech, as if the words were hung up for a moment and his lids could force them down and out of his mouth.
“I’m not looking at you,” I said, looking at him.
“I got here not long ago and Doc Brumus put me here. Steam’s good for me. I have wungs.”
“Wings?” I asked, and I thought o
f him in flight.
“Wings?” He looked confused. “Did I say ‘wings’?”
“You said ‘wungs.’”
“I meant lungs, weak lungs.” Then he muttered, “I get nervous and put words together.”
“Oh. Wungs. Weak lungs. Are you nervous?”
He didn’t answer. “You could work for us. You know that?”
“But I sew.”
“They’re switching people around and we need help here. You could scrub these bloody sheets yourself.” He looked at me, his head cocked, his face sweet and damp. “The Bleeder of Stump Cottage. I like you.”
“Why?” I asked. No one had ever stated that they liked me.
“I don’t usually like people, but when I do, it sticks.”
And this was how the miracle worked. Now I was born. We scrubbed laundry together on washboards in large metal tubs, held by a cloud of steam.
Chapter Five
The Differences Between
Pim and Pom
Ruth
Lying on my side in bed, I stare at the gauze curtains so brightly lit that it almost seems like there should be snow on the ground outside reflecting sun. I used to like winter when I was a kid. One time, Tilton and I built a small igloo in the backyard, though it didn’t last. I was the kind of child always making houses, as if my own house didn’t quite count. My husband, Ron, walks out of the bathroom and picks out a tie from a rack attached to the closet door.
“I was always making houses when I was little,” I say aloud. “Igloos, forts out of sofa cushions, nests out of pillows. I once lived under the dining room table for two whole weeks. It had a white tablecloth with little yellow embroidered flowers that went all the way to the ground. It was my tent. I wonder why some kids do that.”
“It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to figure that one out,” he says.
I think of Tilton—a sharp ache. Why now? Because I’m fairly sure that I’m losing Ron. New losses dig up past losses, as if one needs the other to remember how it’s done. Before we married, Ron portrayed his ex-wife, Corinne, as high-strung, cloying, and humorless. But the last time I saw her, at their son Justin’s high-school graduation, she was dating a housepainter and made two bawdy jokes. How would Ron describe me one day? He could say, “She married me because she wanted a shot at normalcy. Can you believe how banal it was to live with her?” In a sense, it’s true. Though I wouldn’t meet Ron until my midtwenties, I ran away from home when I was sixteen because I wanted to make a new home, one where I would be deemed normal.
“Did you take the dogs out?” I ask.
“They’ve had their morning constitutionals, and yapped at the Doberman next door, in a perfunctory way. They’re going through the motions, Pomeranian-wise.”
“You’re projecting.” My husband is going through the motions these days, marriage-wise.
“Well, what’s worse? Projecting or trying to fix a failing marriage by adopting twin Pompoms?”
Though it galls me to admit, he’s right. I adopted the dogs, impulsively, a couple of months ago. I was introduced to them by a friend who rescues dogs, and at first I thought I was just overwhelmed by their cuteness, but as soon as I walked them into the house, I knew it was about our marriage. Ron and I have been married for only three years and together for five, a second marriage for both of us. It seems a little early to lose momentum. Already, I imagine the relationship as a beach, and I’m an old man wearing black socks and sandals, waving a metal detector over the sand, hoping for beeps so I can dig for a watch, anything that seems like it could have a heartbeat.
And then he adds, “It would be better for Justin if we stayed together. You know that.”
Ron has two children from his first marriage: Colette, who’s twenty-five, and Justin, who’s twenty. Justin is a sweet kid, always sipping from water bottles to compensate for his dry mouth, the result of his antidepressants. He’s been given a lot of labels over the years: light Asperger’s, depression/anxiety, ADHD. He’s tried a lot of therapies: occupational, behavioral, pharmaceutical…Sometimes I wonder what he and Tilton might have in common, though I doubt she’s had any official diagnoses. Who’s better off?
“It’s hardly a matter of staying married for the sake of the kids,” I say. I have a daughter too—Hailey. She lives with her dad in Tucson—her vehement choice when she turned nine, two years ago, after a year of living with me and Ron, who wasn’t as interested in the realities of raising another child as he’d thought he’d be. Ron and I live outside Chicago, where he accepted an endowed chair at a liberal arts college not long after we met, and we have Hailey for winter holidays and two weeks in the summer after back-to-back camps. I’ll see Hailey in two months, in early August. I shut my eyes. The bright sun is a dark blot on my vision. I haven’t spoken to her in two weeks, even though she has her own cell phone now. I bought it for her so she could call me anytime. She uses it to call her friends. Hailey is my greatest joy and my greatest sorrow. It works that way sometimes. My grandmother, the famed Harriet Wolf, was the one who taught me this—not in person, not the way your average grandmother might impart wisdom to her granddaughter, but the way any of her readers might learn it: through her books. In The Curator of Our Earthly Needs, Daisy holds twin sparklers on a sloping lawn and thinks, “As if joy needs sorrow to understand itself. And sorrow, without joy, has no bearings.” My response is a breath: Hailey.
As if sensing that my mood has shifted, Ron walks over and sits on the edge of the bed. In the bright sun, he looks old. He is old, I remind myself—nineteen years older than I am. But he’s handsome, especially by academic standards. (I appreciate the low academic standards for beauty—by which I’m pretty, which is one of the reasons I like academe in general.) Ron is even a little rugged-looking, and he has young hair, which he tends to with expensive haircuts and products.
He brushes a stray wisp from my cheek, tucks it behind my ear. “Take away the expectations,” he says, “and we could be happy.”
For people on the verge of divorce, we talk about our marriage in unsettlingly calm tones. Ron wants to stay married—to keep the money intact. He was torn asunder by his first marriage. And by “take away the expectations” he means we should stay married but as housemates, maybe date each other and other people. The expectations are monogamy and fidelity. (He doesn’t mention Melody Roth, the grad student he flirts with.) Due to residual sexual theories popular in the seventies—which stained Ron’s indoctrination—he thinks that we’re intellectual enough to separate sex from love. Or maybe he’s trying to hold on to me any way he can. He claims to love me.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
This isn’t the first time he’s made the suggestion. Another woman—one who knows herself better?—would slap him. But I’ve realized this: the reason we should get divorced—the apathy, the inertia—is the same reason we haven’t. Can a casual marriage end in a casual divorce? Can human beings be that cavalier?
Perhaps some can, but not me. The divorce would be painful. Maybe I’d be happier, but I’d still have to mourn this loss. I’ve been through this before, and divorce can start as an idea but it becomes visceral. Ideas in this marriage, however, are cut off from emotions. Ideas are glittery conversational doodads to be collected and doled out as banter. In my current circle, banter has a bloated status. Emotions, on the other hand, are primitive.
“Hey, if we don’t stay together, we’d have to decide custody of the Pompoms. It’ll get messy.” He’s trying to lighten the mood.
“I think whoever can tell them apart should have to take them,” I say flatly.
“Better yet,” he says, “let’s not get divorced at all!”
I try to pivot away from the dissolution of our marriage. “How is Justin doing? Have you talked to him recently?” The last I heard, he wanted to transfer colleges for the third time.
“He seems to think Towson has the best website. Students are consumers. I guess I’m just some product.” I ignor
e the self-pity, and as the cue for me to reassure him expires, he fills the silence. “Are you coming to the wedding?”
Colette’s wedding is only a week away, in New York City. Three days after it’s over, the Harriet Wolf Society’s convention meets in DC—the one-hundredth anniversary of my grandmother’s birth. Ron is one of the rare male board members of the society, a reviewer for academic papers on Wolf. I’m purely decorative.
“Would Colette want me there? Really?”
Colette, a lesbian in college and for a few years afterward, is now marrying a man named Phil. Full of righteous indignation, she’d hated me for marrying her father, for all the obvious, personal reasons, but also because she had pegged my motive for doing it on my weakness within the strictures of a patriarchal society. Glaring at Ron and me at an upscale Thai restaurant, she said, “I don’t know which of you is more fucking pathetic. Wait! Yes I do. You!” She pointed at me. “Your father abandoned you so you’re marrying my daddy? That, my friend, is some fucked-up heterosexuality!” It was a moment I’ve never forgotten.
“Of course she wants you there,” Ron says. “Anyway, she’d only misread your absence as an attempt to garner attention.” This is so true. “What about the HWS convention? Are you going to leave me to wander it alone?”
The last and only time I’ve gone, Ron introduced me as Harriet’s granddaughter. People drilled me with arcane questions about my grandmother’s texts, complained about my mother’s hostility to Wolf scholars, asked me to sign something commemorative, and openly pitied me—I was no Harriet Wolf, after all. What a shame! “I don’t know,” I say to Ron.
“You have no other obligations,” he says, which is coded. He wanted me to take on summer teaching, and the subtext of his tone is that I’m spoiled. “Have you seen my cell?” he asks, and leaves the bedroom in search of his phone, which is in a perpetual cycle of being lost and then found and then lost again.