So it had seemed, until that deceptively lovely July Fourth day as Frances sat on the quilt beside slumbering Ann, her gaze fixed on the house, on the window of the bedchamber where her mother burned with fever.
Just two days before, the reassuringly calm midwife—Mrs. Leuba, the watchmaker’s wife from down the street—had arrived with her bag of instruments and poultices. She had smiled at the children and climbed the stairs to Mama’s room, alone. Behind the closed door, Elizabeth whispered to Frances, their mother lay in bed with the windows shut and the curtains drawn, the air still and stifling. The precautions kept out harmful drafts but did little to muffle their mother’s moans, which sent a shiver down the back of Frances’s neck and made her faintly ill from worry.
She did not overhear her mother’s ordeal for long, for soon after the midwife’s arrival Papa told Mammy Sally to take the children up the hill to Grandmother Parker’s house, where they were to remain until Mama had been safely delivered of her child. There Elizabeth dutifully helped their grandmother look after Mary and Ann, and Levi helped the servants with the outside chores, but Frances spent the hours pacing on the front porch and gazing intently down at her own home, built on the lower half of Grandmother Parker’s lot. She tried in vain to glimpse signs of movement through the drawn curtains of her house, cringing whenever the wind carried a particularly sharp cry of pain to her ears. Grandmother Parker eventually called her inside for supper, but Frances returned to her post as soon as the table was cleared.
At dusk, she begged, “May I please run down to the house and find out what’s taking so long?”
“Sometimes a woman’s travail can last a day or more,” Grandmother Parker replied, but she agreed to send her maid to inquire, since Papa had expressly asked her to keep the children away. The maid returned with the welcome news that everything was going as expected. Papa sent his love and told them not to worry, but how could Frances not?
The next morning she picked at her breakfast and halfheartedly agreed to mind Ann so her grandmother could finish sewing some garments for the baby’s layette. It seemed ages until Papa finally strode up the hill—light brown hair tousled, cheeks ruddy, blue eyes shining with pride, tall and strong and handsome—to announce that the children had a new baby brother.
Levi, who had fervently prayed for another boy, cheered and punched his fist in the air, while Elizabeth, Frances, and Mary laughed with delight and hugged one another. Ann looked on, confused, thumb in her mouth, until Papa laughed and swept her up in his arms. “If you promise to be quiet and not tire your mother,” he said, looking around at the older children, eyebrows raised for emphasis, “you may come see her now and meet your new brother.”
They promised to be good, so Papa led them home and upstairs to Mama’s bedchamber. They found her sitting up in bed supported by thick down pillows, her face pale but eyes shining, a tiny swaddled bundle in her arms. One by one she called the children forward and introduced them to little George, wrinkled and red-faced, his eyes squeezed shut. When it was Frances’s turn to meet him, he gave a start and a tiny fist burst free from the swaddling blanket. “He’s waving hello to you,” Mama said, soft laughter in her voice.
Frances smiled, thrilled. Little George had not shown such favor to anyone else.
After Frances ceded her place beside Mama to Elizabeth, she watched Papa quietly confer with Mrs. Leuba as she packed her black bag. They smiled and nodded as they spoke, so although Frances couldn’t make out their words, she knew all was well. Mrs. Leuba left soon thereafter, promising to return in the morning to check on mother and baby.
Eventually Mammy Sally shooed the children out of the room while Grandmother Parker settled down in the chair at Mama’s bedside. Papa, who had stayed up all night, dragged himself off to Levi’s bedroom, flung himself down on the bed, and quickly sank into a deep sleep. Frances and her sisters tiptoed off to the parlor, but although they thought they were playing quietly, Mammy Sally soon ordered them outside. Joyful and relieved, they ran and played on the shady hill between their house and their grandmother’s, Ann alternately balanced on Elizabeth’s hip or Frances’s. Whenever they asked Mary to take a turn carrying her, she would recoil, shaking her head and protesting that Ann was too heavy for her.
“Just hold her by the hand then,” said Frances irritably. “You should take a turn minding her.”
“I minded you when I was your age,” Elizabeth said, offering Mary an encouraging smile, as if it was worry rather than disinterest that kept Mary from eagerly volunteering. “You and Levi both.”
Mary sighed and grudgingly let Ann cling to her hand as she unsteadily followed Elizabeth and Frances around the yard. Mary hated to be restrained from skipping along the stone paths or dancing over the lawn, free and unencumbered, and as soon as she could persuade Elizabeth to take over for her, she pried her fingers free of Ann’s grasp and darted away.
Mama was too weary to join them for supper, but she was feeling so well that, as Papa assured the children, he could keep his promise to take them to the Independence Day celebration the next day. Mama would stay home and rest, with Grandmother Parker, Auntie Chaney, and Mammy Sally there to tend to her and the baby.
But the next morning, Frances discovered, Mama had come down with a fever in the night. Responding swiftly to Papa’s summons, Mrs. Leuba had administered draughts and applied poultices, but when she left shortly after dawn, lips pressed together and strain evident in the lines around her eyes, Mama was no better.
The children were still at breakfast, pretending to be cheerful for little Ann’s sake and murmuring worriedly among themselves, when Papa returned from fetching his friend Dr. Warfield, a professor at Lexington’s Transylvania Medical School. “Papa?” Mary called, bolting from her chair, but the two men hurried past the kitchen and up the stairs without a word. Elizabeth lay a hand on Mary’s shoulder, gently pushed her back into her seat, and encouraged her siblings to finish eating, but none of them were hungry anymore.
A faint tremor in her voice, Auntie Chaney scolded them for not cleaning their plates and sent them out to play. Neither she nor Mammy Sally nor Papa had mentioned the Independence Day celebration. Indeed, their agitated father had scarcely spoken a word to any of them as he raced in and out of the house on errands, and as they left through the back door, the silent looks they exchanged conveyed that they all knew their mother was very ill—much too ill for Papa to leave the house except to fetch another doctor.
As the day passed that was exactly what he did. After Dr. Warfield left, Papa summoned Dr. Dudley, a professor of anatomy and surgery at the university who was well liked by all and known for his cheerful manner. But he wasn’t smiling when Frances glimpsed him approaching their front door with his black leather bag, then scarcely pausing to remove his hat as Papa grasped his arm and led him upstairs to Mama.
Auntie Chaney remembered to feed them lunch, but she made them eat outside on the veranda. They preferred eating on the veranda in the summer, but that day it seemed like a punishment, a means to keep them away from Mama. They picked at their food, but only Ann, unaware of the tension that gripped the rest of them, ate more than a mouthful.
“Do you think—” Frances hesitated, then rephrased the question she was afraid to ask. “Do you think Mama will get better?”