This story hung over Marcia’s mind—that laughing youth should grow up into misery and horror, that to grow up did not mean rewards but anguish; even she might go crazy, with a post and chain and a razor. It was terrifying to look at the picture of her great-grandmother, the little girl with the ball, and think of her running through dark Indian forests crying, “Baby! Baby!” and the woods crying back, “Baby! Baby!” and far-off the sound of a baby crying, lost forever. She thought of her great-grandmother always as a little girl with the ball, not as the later picture, the bent old lady in cap and shawl with the tired sad face. “Did she have nice things happen to her finally?” begged Marcia. “Please, Grandma, didn’t nice things happen?”

“Died in the Elm County Poorhouse,” said Grandma. “People didn’t have the money then they have today.” It was like Papa’s songs and Marcia felt that there was not enough room in her chest to bear such woe.

“Who’s this one?” Lena asked, pointing to the next page, a strange foreign gentleman who seemed to have a head coming out of his stomach.

“That is an Oriental prince,” Grandma’s voice now swelled with pride. “He was a Siamese twin and his sister grew out of his stomach. My sister Sarah Rebecca met him on a boat trip to Italy and he very kindly gave her his picture.”

“No, no!” Marcia choked. “Don’t tell me any more, Grandma. No more!”

She ran out the door into the backyard, into the woodshed where they wouldn’t find her slapping her own eyes to keep back tears. But tears were inside her, crying Baby! Baby! oh, Indians, give back the little girl’s baby!

5

DURING THEIR FATHER’S longer absences, the children and their mother spent more and more time at Grandma’s. Aunt Lois turned out one of the teachers and let her sister use the room for her family on the many nights they spent there, for Daisy was not so much afraid as lonesome at night. When some tiff with Aunt Lois—always about Papa—made her stay home in the house on Fourth Street for a few nights, she moved a cot into the children’s room. She pushed the dresser against the door, and put Papa’s revolver under her pillow. Then she wrapped her red Chinese kimono around herself and sat square-legged on the bed—her curly brown hair over her shoulders, telling stories long after bedtime. When a lightning storm came she was really happy and not at all frightened. She said burglars wouldn’t be out on a night like this. In the middle of the night the thunder would begin and the rain pour. Lena and Marcia would cry out with fear and hold tight to each other. But their mother would jump out of bed and pull a chair up to the window. “Come, kids, watch the lightning!” she would cry and sometimes picked them out of bed, snuggled in blankets to sit in the chair by the window with her. It was something special to be gotten up in the night so the girls tried to be worthy of the honor but they could hardly keep back their cries of terror at each new thunderbolt or rip of lightning. They put their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes, peeking once in a while at their mother, whose eyes were shining in her rapt face, as if the storm was a story or a song to her.