Good Hope Road: A Novel (45 page)

Madeleine was laughing over the antics of the newest foal as it gambolled through the grass when she had her first spell of light-headedness. It was fleeting, lasting mere seconds, and she thought nothing of it. Two more episodes followed the next week, both of such cursory duration that she paid no attention to these either. It was only when she threw up without warning, out by the side of the barn, that it occurred to her.

Ellie summoned the doctor who cheerfully confirmed their suspicions – Madeleine was pregnant.

When they told Jim, he nodded, rubbed his forehead, nodded again, eyes widening first with surprise then flooding with joy. He grinned, a great, big, foolish grin that spread right across his face. In two long strides, he was at Madeleine’s side and uncaring of his wet, mud-splattered clothes, he lofted her into his arms.

At first, Madeleine was caught up in the general whirl of excitement. There were congratulatory calls to take and a pile of mail to reply to, good wishes to the happy couple streaming in from Boston and New York. The Major had broken out his best cigars over the news, patting Jim on the back and offering Madeleine his compliments in an endearingly formal manner. He would graft a new apple tree in honour of the baby he said, just as one had been grafted for every Stonebridge boy before him.

‘You’ve very sure it will be a boy,’ Madeleine remarked, laughing.

‘The odds are he will be,’ the Major said quietly. ‘There’s a long line of boys in this family.’ He hesitated as a thought struck him. ‘Have you thought of a name?’

Jim shrugged. ‘Not yet. James something Stonebridge, I suppose. If it’s a boy.’

The Major tapped the end of his cigar on the ashtray. ‘Would you . . .’ he cleared his throat. ‘Would you perhaps consider naming him James Henry?’

Jim looked up sharply at his father.
Henry
. He remembered how the Major had called this name aloud while delirious with fever at Anacostia. The way he’d denied it afterwards, and refused to discuss it any further. He took in the way his father was sitting in his armchair now, fiddling with his cigar, not looking at either of them as he awaited their response.

‘It depends on what Madeleine thinks too,’ Jim said carefully, ‘but sure, I like the sound of it. James Henry Stonebridge, if it’s a boy.’

‘James Henry,’ Madeleine repeated, rolling the name on her tongue. ‘I like it too. So which one’s Henry?’ she asked, gesturing at the portraits and silhouette pictures on the wall.

Jim glanced at his father again, seeing beyond the impassive expression to the slow, vulnerable gladness dawning in his eyes. He shrugged. ‘Just an old family name,’ he lied.

The prospect of the baby seemed to energise the Major, seeding him with quiet purpose in a way that nothing else had, not since the rout at Anacostia. Rejecting out of hand the seedling catalogues that arrived with such regularity in the mail, the Major had Jim leave word in town for Black Pete instead. When that venerable emerged once more from the woods, the Major tasked him with finding a truly unique apple tree, one worthy of this as yet unborn grandson, from which a graft might be developed.

Pete came through magnificently, with two scions wrapped in moss. They came from a tree so special that they were the first folks he’d ever told about it. ‘Edges a pond, far into the woods,’ he divulged, glancing about him as if wary of who else might be listening. ‘With that fresh, sweet water to drink, and these here apples to eat, a man wants for nothing.’ The fruit so perfect of hue and taste, he added in a rare fit of drollery, that he wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t the very tree that had got Adam and Eve into all that mischief.

The scions weren’t all he’d brought with him. Fishing about in his sack, he handed a touched Madeleine a beautifully detailed stallion that he’d carved from butternut wood. ‘For the wee ‘un,’ he said, nodding bashfully in the general direction of her midriff. He’d have gifted it when the baby was actually here, he explained, but it could be a while before he came into town again.

All in all, in those first few months of her pregnancy, Madeleine felt for the first time in her life as though she’d pulled off something truly worthwhile. It was only after the initial euphoria died away that the doubts began. She passed her hand over her still-flat belly time and again, examining the curves of bosom and hip for the slightest hints of tumescence. She’d lie awake at night, staring at the carved stallion just visible on the bedside table in the moonlight, following the detailing around the hooves and mane as she belatedly tried to come to grips with all the changes that had taken place in just over a year.

It was as if she’d been carried away on the crest of a wave, blithely riding its currents all this while, and only now, with the weight of responsibility, this new life steadily burgeoning inside her, was she finally taking stock of just how much her life had altered. Her mind touched repeatedly upon the vague, half-formed ideas she’d always harboured, their specifics indeterminate, but centred around a common theme – of going places, doing things. With her dancing perhaps, or maybe the theatre, just what exactly she’d never been quite certain of, but always a sense of something larger out there, something she could be a part of. It was just a question of finding it, she’d always assumed.

She wondered now if she ever would. She felt helplessly hemmed in, removed from the world by the stone walls that rambled endlessly around these hills, by the bucolic stretches of apple orchard and sugarbush, and quiet, dozing woodland.

Jim awoke one night to the muffled sound of her crying; when he put his hand to her face, her cheeks were wet.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, bewildered, and she shook her head.

‘You’re not happy about the baby,’ he guessed, flatly.

‘I am. Of course I am, it’s just . . . I don’t know, it’s all too much, so soon – a
baby
, Jim,’ she tried to explain.

‘Why marry me if you didn’t want my children?’ he said curtly, unsettled by the sight of her crying and more hurt than he cared to admit by what he perceived as her rejection.

‘Is that the only reason you wanted to be married – so I could push out your children?’ Her eyes fell on the butternut wood stallion. ‘I’m not one of your brood mares,’ she said, angered.

They lay in silence for a while after that. ‘Madeleine,’ he began, trying to make amends, and she turned blindly towards him, burying her face in his chest. They kissed, with a tenderness that he misread; he reached between her legs and she pushed him away, upset by the notion that perhaps this was all he wanted from her.

‘Not one of your brood mares,’ she repeated sharply. She dreamed of skunk cabbage that night, of the hungry spathes, bursting through the ice.

President Roosevelt set in motion a series of initiatives under the ‘New Deal’ that were designed to rejuvenate the economy. One of the very first was the formation of the Civil Conservation Corps – the CCC – a public works programme eligible to single men all across the country. They had to be willing to work in forest conservation, among other projects, and would each be paid thirty dollars a month, of which a minimum of twenty-two dollars was to be remitted to their families.

Connor cheered the initiative. It was almost a sign, he’d thought, them wanting single men, what with him and the missus having split up. The money wasn’t much, but it was something. When he tried to enrol, however, he was informed that the upper age limit for eligibility was twenty-five.
Twenty-five
, an age that even the youngest of the Great War veterans had last seen over ten years before.

Veterans began to talk of marching yet again to Washington. About three thousand gathered there in May, under the aegis of a veteran’s convention. This time, however, the Government was prepared. Determined to avoid another Anacostia debacle, they set up a huge camp to house the veterans at Fort Hunt, just outside the city.

Connor had run through the wages he’d earned during inaugural week, and was sheltering at the Salvation Army on Pennsylvania Avenue when he’d heard about the camp. He hurried there at once, letting out a low whistle of appreciation as he looked about him. Hooverville, this was not. Rows of eight-man tents were laid out in company streets of forty tents each. The tents came equipped with electricity; at the end of each street were sinks and running water. There were latrines, and even a bathhouse with a hundred showers. And the food! Connor stared disbelievingly at his plate. Baked ham. Potatoes. Peas. A hunk of bread, a generous pat of butter.

‘There’s rice pudding after, and coffee,’ the veteran sitting next to him said. ‘And more like this, at every meal. Bologna, potato salad, apple butter for supper. Oranges, eggs and potatoes for breakfast, with more bread, and as much coffee as you want.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘
Oranges
!’ he repeated happily, loosening his belt.

Connor wolfed down every morsel and went back for seconds. He noticed the battery of armed soldiers patrolling the perimeter of the camp, keeping a close watch on the veterans, but he was too hungry to care.

He was still there when Mrs Roosevelt surprised the veterans with a visit. She listened to their grievances, speaking in turn of the many battlefronts of the Great War that she’d visited, and leading them all in a rendition of ‘Long Trail A-Winding’. That small gesture, of empathy, of a woman’s touch, of just
listening
, went a long way. ‘Hoover sent an army. Roosevelt, his wife,’ a veteran commented wryly.

Soon after the First Lady’s visit, the Government, in a conciliatory gesture, made twenty-five thousand slots in the CCC available to veterans, married or single. There were those who said the Government could go screw itself. ‘Fuck the CCC and fuck this dollar-a-day pay’ they said angrily, what about the bonus that they’d already earned?

There were many like Connor, however, who figured that one dollar was better than none. ‘Sign me up!’ he said eagerly, and was one of the first of over two thousand men at Fort Hunt who enrolled.

‘Let’s drive over,’ Jim suggested to the Major, ‘make a day of it. Maybe some of the folks from Anacostia are there.’

He’d gone looking for his father as soon as he’d heard about the CCC veteran camp that was being set up right there in Vermont, in nearby East Barre. He’d found the Major in the cellar, checking in yet again on the two precious scions that had been left to rest there until the grafting could begin next spring.

The Major’s eyes momentarily brightened at the prospect. Then images resurfaced in his mind: the burning shanties, the defeated faces of the men. It reared up again, the sense of shame, the feeling that he’d let them all down by not lobbying hard enough, or with sufficient heart. The guilt, unreasonable as it was, that he was partly to blame for the catastrophe. ‘No,’ he said baldly to Jim, turning away.

Unwilling to give up so easily, Jim drove up there alone. Maybe he’d come across Connor or one of the others – it would cheer the Major up, he knew it would, to meet them again. The site was teeming with newly arrived veterans, almost two thousand so far, a camp official informed him. When he asked after Connor, Angelo and a few of the others from Anacostia, however, the man shook his head. ‘There’s too many come in all at once, so the paperwork’s still getting sorted. You could leave word at the registration office,’ he suggested.

Jim drove away, disappointed. He started to brood once more about Madeleine on the way home. He was yet to forgive her for that barb about being a brood mare. Yet again, by tacit agreement, they’d left the argument of that night unaddressed, pretending it had never happened, but her words still festered. He couldn’t understand her ambivalence over their baby; it cut to the heart of him to think she might not want this child. He reacted in the only way he knew how, from all his childhood years of growing up without his mother and subject to the vagaries of the Major’s moods. Jim withdrew into himself, masking his hurt under a cover that alternated between reserve and a cool flippancy.

When she’d pushed her supper around the plate, saying the very sight of it made her feel ill, ‘There’s bread if you can manage that,’ he offered.

‘Bread will make me even fatter.’

He’d gone back to his food without comment.

‘No, Madeleine, you aren’t fat,’ she said for him.

‘You aren’t,’ he pointed out, ‘just heavier now that you’re pregnant,’ and was genuinely baffled when she called him a boor.

Madeleine had continued to swing between cherishing and chafing at her pregnancy as the summer wore on. It made her feel guilty, the internal back and forth, as if she were already failing this child. She called a girlfriend, hoping for reassurance, a woman a few years ahead of her at school who’d recently birthed her second. ‘Oh, it’s all worth it, but say goodbye to your waistline,’ she said briskly. ‘The hips too, they never quite sit the same again.’ There was a mind-scrambling list of leaking bladders, flabby stomachs and other post-partum mementoes. Madeleine asked, horrified, why she’d never talked about any of this before. ‘Didn’t want to scare you girls off,’ was the cheerful response.

In a fit of desperation, she called her mother, who told her not to be silly. ‘It’s what one does – get married and have children.’ When Madeleine asked why her parents had stopped at just the one child, ‘One was
quite
enough,’ her mother replied definitively.