Baker Towers Read Online Free

suit. My plans have changed.” His cheeks were red—from cold or embarrassment, Rose couldn’t tell.
    Her fingers shook as she handed him the hanger. He covered her hand with his. That Friday he took her to a Christmas dance at the town hall, and a month later he wore the suit to their wedding. The reception, a raucous affair at his uncle’s house, lasted three days and two nights. For reasons Rose didn’t understand, a pig’s trough had been brought into the house, and Stanley’s older brother had danced a jig in it. Her wedding night was spent in the uncle’s attic. By the end of the festivities she was already pregnant.
    She gave birth in the house on Polish Hill, helped by a neighbor woman trained in the old country as a midwife. Stanley considered his own name too Polish, so they called the baby George: the name of the first president, the most American name they knew. Like all company houses, theirs had three upstairs rooms; from the very beginning, the baby had one to himself. To Rose, raised in a cramped apartment above Rizzo’s Tavern, the place seemed cavernous. Her mother had shared an icebox and a clothesline with two other families. The narrow yard had been worn bare by her own chickens and children, and those of the Rizzos and DiNatales.
    Dorothy was born a year later, shocking the neighborhood. Nobody had guessed Rose was pregnant; she had gained only a few pounds. For months she’d felt consumed from within and without: the girl baby growing inside her, the boy baby hungry at her breast. Later a neighbor took her aside and explained what all the Polish women knew: secret ways of delaying pregnancy; times in the month to push a man away; special teas that brought on bleeding if a woman was late. The Polish children were nursed for years; in some mysterious way, this delayed the return of a woman’s monthly bleeding. Without such precautions, Rose was told, she’d give birth once a year, until she turned forty or dropped dead from exhaustion. Some women took these methods to extremes. May Poblocki nursed her sons until they started school, for reasons obvious to all: shewas a handsome woman, and her husband drank. The women joked that May’s son Teddy, stationed overseas in England, came home on furlough just to nurse.
    Rose followed the advice strictly, and her babies came at longer intervals. Three years after Dorothy, she miscarried; the baby dissolved quietly, a soft mass of tissue and blood. Two years later, Joyce was born. Sandy was to be her last child; nursing him, she waited for forty, the age of freedom. Each new baby required time she couldn’t spare, space and money they didn’t have. The mines were slow then; at times Stanley worked only three days a week. In summer the children went barefoot. In winter they lived on dumplings made from stale bread, peppers and tomatoes she’d canned in September. The girls wore petticoats she sewed from flour sacks. Each day after school, Stanley took the older children to pick coal at the tipple; when the shuttle cars were unloaded, there was always some scrap coal that fell by. At suppertime they came back with a wagonload, enough to heat the house for a day.
    By her fortieth birthday she had four children—a small family, by the standards of Polish Hill. She and Stanley celebrated her freedom. By then he was working Hoot Owl; each morning he washed up in the basement while she sent the children off to school. Afterward, the house empty and quiet, they climbed the stairs to their bedroom.
    She’d been surprised when her cycles stopped. “It’s the change,” said May Poblocki, who’d gone through it herself. The heaviness in her breasts, the strange dreams, the waves of sadness and joy—according to May it was all part of the change. Then, one afternoon as she staked tomatoes in the garden, Rose felt a stirring inside her and knew she was pregnant again.
    The baby was born in November, a month after her forty-third birthday. The labor lasted