The Midwife of Hope River

Mrs. Kelly trotted down the stairs, a big woman with graying black hair pinned up in a bun. None of the trendy flapper girl clothes for her. She wasn’t fat and she wasn’t skinny, just a tree you could lean on.

“Well, dear me! Come in.”

Sitting in Sophie Kelly and Nora Waters’s apartment over the bread shop, having tea, I was at once comforted. Nora brought me one of her clean white long-sleeved work blouses, and Sophie lent me her brush. I couldn’t tell them why I’d landed in Pittsburgh, and they had sense enough not to ask.

The midwife insisted that we go right away to see a lady who had just delivered twins and might need a girl like me. She lived a few miles away with her husband and two other children in one of those big homes near Friendship. Sophie was like that; if there was a problem, she went straight at it like a bull toward a red wool shirt.

As luck would have it, there was no work for a milkmaid with the family in Friendship or anywhere else, but Mrs. Kelly, a hospital-trained nurse turned midwife, admired my grit, or maybe just took pity on me, and offered me their back bedroom upstairs. There was only a cot, a chifforobe, and a small table, nothing much, but with the two women, I felt really safe for the first time in days.

This was 1913, just about Christmas. Mrs. Kelly bound my breasts with comfrey leaves until my milk dried up, and Nora found me a job on the line where she worked at Westinghouse. The United States was gearing up for the Great War, over many objections, and Pittsburgh was booming. I didn’t care if the factory made munitions or who got killed with them. I had friends and a home. I was happy.

Nora and Sophie

It was months before I figured out that Sophie and Nora were lovers. I caught them kissing in the kitchen, and I don’t mean a smooch on the cheek either. Nora’s blue eyes shimmered, and she had her hand down Mrs. Kelly’s blouse. Not that I minded; I’d known other lesbians when I worked at the Majestic.

When you’ve been a milkmaid for other people’s babies; lived in other people’s homes; lied about your age; stolen jewelry; run away with nothing but your cloak, your favorite painting, and your mother’s old Bible and hymnal, you accept that people survive and find happiness however they can.

At first, I always called Mrs. Kelly “Mrs. Kelly” instead of “Sophie” because she was old enough to be my mother, though forty-four doesn’t seem old now. I called Nora “Nora” because she was thirty-four, more like a girl, though now that I’m thirty-six, I don’t feel at all girlish.

In the fall, the three of us moved to a little row house near Kenny’s Park, the one they later turned into Kennywood, the place with merry-go-round rides and an arcade. The two-story white clapboard had a huge living room with a bay window. There was a larger kitchen and a trolley stop one block away. We took the streetcar to work or into the city when we wanted to go to a rally, a free concert, or a baseball game at Forbes Field. It cost only a nickel either way and with Nora and I each making seven dollars a week, we could afford the extravagance.

After work and on weekends, Nora distributed birth control information on the downtown Pittsburgh streets, and sometimes I went with her. At night Nora and I would go to the Crawford Grill in the Hill District, where we heard Duke Ellington and some of the local jazz musicians, like Erroll Garner and Billy Strayhorn. And then there were the gardens and the zoo at Highland Park. Mrs. Kelly liked that.

Those were the days when on Friday nights we’d have friends, both men and women, over for Irish stew and homemade bread. We’d read out loud the poems of Walt Whitman, passages by Tolstoy and polemics from the International Workers Association. Once Emma Goldman stopped by and several times Mother Jones, the union organizer, did too.

Mother’s given name was Mary Harris Jones, and she’d been a dressmaker before her four children died of yellow fever and she joined with the United Mine Workers. Most people don’t know that. She carried her sadness like I carry mine, under her heart. If you’d asked how she dealt with it, for a moment she wouldn’t have known what you meant. Then she might pull the dried knot of pain out and stare at it like a foreign thing until she remembered . . .

Mother Jones brought John L. Lewis with her. This was before he was president of the UMW, but I didn’t like him. He watched me from under his thick black eyebrows and smelled like Mr. Vanderhoff. Daisy Lampkin, our black suffragette friend, introduced us to W. E. B. Du Bois when he was in Pittsburgh on NAACP business. Daisy was a real firecracker. I’d never seen a woman with so much energy and passion for justice.

As the night wore on, we’d drink homemade wine that Nora made and sing Joe Hill’s songs, “The Tramp,” “There Is Power in a Union,” and my favorite, “The Rebel Girl.”

“That’s the Rebel Girl, that’s the Rebel Girl, to the working class she’s a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy to the fighting Rebel Boy.” Ruben came with Mother Jones one time too, but we didn’t even say hello.

On cold nights, when the temperature outside was below zero and the coal heater stove couldn’t keep up, the three of us slept together in Mrs. Kelly’s big bed, Nora, Sophie, and I. We’d snuggle under the feather quilt in our long flannel nightgowns and call ourselves the three bears. Nora was the papa, though she dressed the most womanly, Mrs. Kelly the mama, and I was Baby Bear. We’d laugh so hard, Mrs. Kelly would have to run to the potty to pee.

16

Dreams

Lately, I’ve been bothered by dreams, and I suspect Mr. Hester’s presence in the house has affected me.

First I dream of Lawrence.

We’re walking along the boardwalk in Chicago on a warm fall day. He’s a tall, slim man with the yellow hair of a Swede and light blue eyes. I’m sixteen, and when his baby kicks, I grab his hand to show him, then step up on a park bench and leap on his back. Laughing, Lawrence runs around the park, holding my legs, my arms outstretched like a seagull. “I’m flying!” I yell.

My face is wet when I wake. It’s been so long since I was young and in love. A pounding on the door downstairs jerks me out of my tears.

December 29, 1929. Dark moon, dark night for travel.

Unexpected summons to the home of Mrs. Clara Wetsel of Liberty. She was in labor with her fourth baby and having heavy bleeding. Her husband and she didn’t want to call on Dr. Blum because they’re still beholden to him for forty-five dollars after her husband, J.K., lost his arm at the sawmill.