Consciousness narrowed down to the width of her small hand in front of her face and the little dot of false light floating over the audience that she was unable to blink away.

But she stared straight ahead and willed herself to hold steady for a few seconds longer. Already she knew she would recover.

Family Secrets

Family Secrets

Acres of corn, wheat fields and oats led right up to the town of DeKalb, Illinois, where there was a state normal school that prepared farm girls to go out and become school teachers, one of them being my young mother. This was not long after the First World War. She was sent first to teach in a four-room school in a place called Cortland where she stayed for two years. Why only two years? I must have asked her this at one time, or else my brother Barclay did. “I got sick,” she said, “and had to go home for a while.”

Where did she go? She went back to the forty-acre farm near Lemond where her mother and father lived, and after a year she got a job teaching on the west side of Chicago where she soon met our father and got married and began her real life.

I’ve thought lately about that time of sickness; what kind of sickness is it that makes a young woman leave a job and go home to her parents for a whole year? The last time I saw Barclay I said to him, “I think Mom must have got pregnant that year she had to quit her first job.”

It took him a minute to figure out what I was talking about. For a man so intelligent he has a poor memory for the details of our childhood. Once I tested him on the color of the garage doors we had at home in Maywood. “Blue,” he said. “No,” I shot back, “brown.”

I had to remind him about Mom leaving the school in Cortland. I had to trot out the whole story, and then he leaned back and smiled his off-focus smile and said, oh yes, now he remembered.

“Well,” I said, “what’s your honest opinion? Do you think she got herself in trouble, as they used to say in those days?”

He shook his moony face. “I doubt it.”

“A year’s a long time to be sick.” I made my voice curl up at the end, pointed it accusingly at the memory of our dead mother.

“Girls didn’t then,” Barclay said in a deceptively prim way he has.

“Oh no? What about Mary Morgan?”