Bittersweet

When the crowd had thi

Over the weekend, Imogene relaxed, enjoying the company of the Utterbacks. But first thing Monday morning, she was outside her old schoolhouse. Her eyes traveled down from the neat belltower and over the shingled roof to the clean white walls with their skirting of foliage. “I love this school. I’m almost afraid to go in. I’ll remember what I’ve been missing.” Mr. Utterback held one of the doors open for her and she smiled, shamefaced. “Thank you. I’ve allowed myself enough self-pity for a day.”

Rows of coathooks ran down the sides of a gloomy central hallway above low benches built onto the walls. Two doors opened to each side: Imogene pushed open the first door on the right. “I can smell the chalk. I think if a child hadn’t set foot here for a hundred years, there would still be the smell of chalk.” Orderly rows of wooden desks, holes for inkwells black in the upper right-hand corners, awaited the autumn’s crop of children. Imogene walked between them, trailing her fingers over the scarred wood. She stopped at an unremarkable desk three rows from the front of the room, pressing her palm against the wood as though its history could come up through the oak.

“How is Mary Beth?” she asked. “And that boy she was to marry? Kevin, wasn’t it? Kevin Ramsey.”

“She is with child. Mrs. Utterback says it is due the end of July.”

Imogene smiled and leaned back against the desk. “A baby! God bless her. She’ll make a wonderful mother.” She was still for a moment, smiling, her eyes soft. Mr. Utterback folded his crippled hands in front of him and looked away, leaving her to her private thoughts. She laughed aloud. “Mary Beth a mother. That is good news.” Straightening, she dusted one hand against the other. “I’d best not see her. Will you tell her I asked after her?”

“Of course I will. I seldom see her, but Mrs. Utterback sometimes calls.”

“Could I leave something with you? For the baby. If it would be awkward, perhaps you might say it was from you.” Imogene’s face puckered with concern, making her look younger.

“Thee may leave anything but the textbooks.” He preceded her out into the hall. “There are thy children to think of as well.”

Imogene spent every morning for the next several weeks immersed in the storeroom’s dusty treasures. William worked with her when he could, and sometimes Mrs. Utterback came by with cool drinks and conversation. In the afternoons, when the wet heat of July weighed heavy and the close room became intolerable, Imogene walked through the streets and lanes of Philadelphia, visiting the places she had known as a child. She spoke to no one. She went alone to the house that had been her home. The garden was little more than dirt, and one of the shutters on the gabled window hung crooked, the hinge wrenched and broken by the wind. Two grubby children, apparently untended, poked at an anthill near the gate. Imogene stopped and the toddlers left their game to stare up at her with solemn eyes. She gave each a pe

In the fifth week of her stay, she and Mrs. Utterback were in the backyard at a table under the spreading branches of an oak, surrounded by the glue pots and papers. Piles of mended books lay drying in the late afternoon sun, boxes of broken and torn primers were scattered under the table and around their chairs. Mrs. Utterback delicately dabbed glue onto the spine of a Webster’s Speller that had been new when she was a girl in school. Imogene had just started for the house to fetch more lemonade when the side gate banged and a disheveled Negro child ran into the yard-a little girl not more than seven years old. Gulping for air, she pulled herself up short in front of Mrs. Utterback, too much out of breath to talk coherently. Imogene stopped on the back steps.

“It all gone bad,” the child gasped. “an’ she been cryin’ for you. It all gone bad an’ Momma sent me.”

Mrs. Utterback took the child by the shoulders and pulled her through the tangle of boxes and onto her lap. “Melissa, sit quiet until thee can breathe.” She held out her glass and the little girl drank the last swallows of lemonade. Her thirst quenched and her excitement abated, she started again.

“Mary Beth Ramsey havin’ her baby an’ Momma ’fraid it go bad. She go over to help, but Missus Sankey say she don’t want no nigger woman around, so Momma stay under the window ’cause she like Missus Ramsey. Momma said it all gone bad.” Melissa had worked herself back into a fright; she leaped off Mrs. Utterback’s lap and pulled at her hands.

Imogene ran down the steps. “Quick, child, run. I can keep up.” She turned to the older woman. “I’ve got to get to her.”

Mrs. Utterback was halfway to the house. “I’ll get Dr. Stricker and follow you.”

Melissa grabbed Imogene’s hand and darted out the gate. It was more than a mile across town to the Ramseys’ house, and when the child tired, Imogene carried her, her long strides throwing her skirts before her. The shady lanes, with their tidy border of homes, grew ragged, the fences leaning and unpainted. Dogs wandered unconfined, sniffing at corners and poking their noses into refuse dumped in the street. The air was foul with the odor of rot, and clouds of flies buzzed over the garbage.

“There!” the girl cried finally, and pointed to a small house near the end of the street, the unfenced yard overgrown with weeds and only the memory of paint still clinging to the weathered wood. Imogene broke into a run. Melissa’s mother, a heavyset woman of indeterminate age, was there to meet them.

“I told you to git Miss Utterback!” she scolded.

“She’s coming with the doctor,” Imogene intervened.

“You better do somethin’ now,” the Negro woman warned, “or there goin’ to be no need for the doctor; Miss Sankey goin’ to kill that child.” She took Imogene by the arm and propelled her up the steps. “You get in there an’ you do somethin’ now, you hear? This nigger’s goin’ to wait here by the door an’ she want to hear somethin’ happenin’.”

The spare front room was empty. The bedroom door stood ajar and Imogene pushed it open slowly. The last light of the sun poured through the window, flooding the room with orange light. A double bed, piled high with clothes and rumpled bedding, took up most of the space. A narrow-faced girl lay amid the covers, her eyes closed. In the corner, by the head of the bed, a sluggish, blowzy woman jabbed at something and there was an angry cry.

Imogene stepped to the foot of the bed. “Is she all right?” she whispered. The woman stared at her with glazed eyes. The air was heavy with the smell of whiskey and blood. Her mouth was slack, and she held a pin in her hand, poised above the protesting form of a newborn infant almost hidden behind a mounded blanket. The baby’s hair was slicked against its head, and a gelatinous mass of afterbirth extended from it like a snail’s trail. The umbilical cord, uncut, disappeared into a fold of heavy wool behind the infant’s head. The baby turned milky eyes on Imogene and smeared its mouth with a tiny, bloody fist.

The sun dipped below the sill, and the orange light drained from the room. Without the food of color, the blankets showed their black ba