linda wendling

Inappropriate Babies
a short story
by

That year, 1904, all the rice growers in Louisiana came down with the sickness, called maladie des jambes. I demanded new French soaps against it, and even though I was only eight, my mother made the nanny buy the soap for me, even though the nanny said it would spoil me. Still, not content with a mere bath that night, after my parents and my nanny were asleep, I took the new French soaps out of their brown papers and stood up on my bed naked, the wrappers all around me on the white coverlet, the moonlight blue on my small limbs. I vigorously rubbed the French soap, dry, all over my skin, and scratched it under my fingernails. I put my nightie back on. Then I stuffed the soaps and their wrappers into my pillowcase to keep them near my face.

As I lay back, relieved, I saw that the window was open a little, and the earthy mud smell of the rice fields drifted in over the sill with the gauzy, white curtains. I held my breath against this fresh air, warding off disease. With each mild, earthy current, I held my breath and buried my face in the bumpy soap pillow, their wrappers crackling when I moved. I did not so much fall asleep as faint, from holding my breath.

I was used to this habit and it satisfied me.

Father had high praise for the rice disease. He predicted it would be a good sell. I got to help him haul his photographic equipment into Mother's parlor. She fussed about the little tins of flash powder and the troops of puffy victims on her red Persian rug, but she let him do it, so I knew it must be a promising disease. Father offered our poorer, rice-growing neighbors one dollar to step into our parlor and show him their strangely marked, edematous limbs. And, of course, I was allowed to stay in the parlor and help, as Father's only daughter, eight years the pride of his life. I wore Mother's perfume for an antibiotic. I smoothed father's canvas backdrop, hung now in the parlor. He painted them himself, precise, an artist. Painted potted palms offered perfection over the real.

Monsieur Thibideau came with his children. They all stood stiff and obedient in their faded farm clothes. This was a family I knew. For the way their swollen, blackened legs made me feel, I slowly, secretly, pushed all the air out of my lungs and held my breath. I lay down immediately on Mother's red Persian carpet to remind myself I was immune. How could a girl like me, whose mother had such a rug, be like the Thibideaux? I was someone's special girl.

But this strategy of lying on Mother's rug did not work for long. From that angle, I could see thin half-moons of dirt in the Thibideau nails where their hands hung limp at their sides. I curled my fingers into the red plush rug and scratched back and forth till the fibers slid under my nails and cleaned them.

Rolling onto my back, I saw Father over me dropping one silver dollar into Monsieur Thibideau's hand. Monsieur Thibideau turned red.

"It was my understanding," he said, "that the one dollar was per person. Otherwise, why drag my children out of the rice fields now, when there is so much work to be done?"

My father won through composure more than rightness. It was his way. To win by virtue of his patience, his inability to fuss. "I am interested," he said, "not in dissecting you all and your malady. I am interested in the peculiarities of the Thibideau manifestation of this disease, the Thibideau strain, if you are interested in being paid to display it for me. However, how can I exhibit it as a unique strain if you are not in the photograph together? No, no, for science the Thibideau strain must remain together."

"This is not fair!" M. Thibideau argued, but no matter how long he shouted at him about the bargain of sixteen limbs of maladie des jambes for the price of four, my father could not be made to understand.

"I am sorry," he shrugged. "Je ne comprends pas."

Until finally, M. Thibideau submitted out of tired disgust, posing, stern-faced, with his children. I lay on the rug watching, light-headed from holding my breath. One little boy had a large wart on his puffed-up thumb. His foot-thick with disease inside the boot, the skin on his leg ballooning and purple above it-touched the rug. I rolled and stood up very fast, head spinning now, and rubbed very hard at my fingers. He had a pretty little face. I had the peculiar distasteful feeling of tears. Stealing off to my room, I leaned against the door and held my breath to work up a good lack of air and fell into a satisfying faint. I dreamt in flat, clean sepias, where the bad things were turned into art. The germ-free dream of the photograph. When I woke up, a few minutes later, the Thibideaux were gone.

* * *

This was 1904, the year the St. Louis World's Fair was preparing to host the greatest collection of medical science exhibits-and photographic exhibits-the world had ever seen. Science and art amuck had doubled my father's already considerable fortune. He traveled all over the country, photographing every scientific phenomenon-and at a time when scientific breakthroughs were falling on the wake of the ones before them, like shuffled cards. His secret? He made two sets of prints-one for the scientific journals, one for the traveling freak shows. My father, always a shrewd businessman, cleaned up at both ends. The rice disease was predicted to be quite a success at the St. Louis World's Fair, and it was in our own neighbors' limbs-a windfall right in my Father's lap.

Around this time, a Frenchman in New Orleans wrote to my father asking him to come take a photograph of his three daughters. But my father was an artist and frowned on something so average as a normal portrait and tucked the letter into the top pocket of his coat, intending to decline. However, we knew the family would hear nothing since my father also frowned on writing tiresome or unpleasant letters. Instead, the letter would rest in his top coat pocket, along with several other yellowed pieces of similar mundaneness, constant reminders of things that he must not bother with. Carrying these reminders, he thought, took care of any other, grosser obligation to respond. When the letters were sufficiently crumbled, he would throw them away. So he put the letter there and the family with three daughters in New Orleans was forgotten.

I was disappointed, of course. A tiresome, normal portrait in New Orleans sounded quite nice. I pictured the three pretty French daughters, sitting solemn with their hair ribbons. After the photo, we might have had a hot chocolate with too much sugar.

* * *

Within that same week, a woman doctor also wrote to my father, explaining that she was very interested in gathering a population of premature infants for the same World's Fair the Thibideau photos were now headed for. The doctor and her colleague had invented a warming box meant to keep premature infants alive longer. She was gathering letters of application from doctors treating pregnant women who did not stand much chance of survival. There were plenty of such subjects, mostly on missions and reservations, but there appeared to be people of money with troubling pregnancies as well. Unfortunately, family doctors, especially small town doctors, sometimes neglected to keep in mind the discriminating, artistic eye needed to gather the right sort of babies for a World's Fair exhibit. They tended, instead, to recommend sick babies willy-nilly.

Her letter drew to its climax at this point, a real economic coup: she asked my father if he would be interested in photographing the applicants to make intriguing posters and to also ensure that these infants-or their mothers, if the babies were not yet born-were of "appropriate quality to be in a World's Fair."

My father said this meant "no Negro babies."

When I said, "What about the reservation babies? Are they all right?" he rubbed his chin and said, "I will have to check." He patted my head then, pronouncing me an interesting girl with a keen business eye, regarding the Indian baby question.

Well. This was, of course, the kind of letter important enough for my father to respond to. He did, saying he would photograph the applicants and weed out "inappropriate ones" from the beginning, making it clear that an additional fee for each rejection would be necessary, of course, since this would be unpleasant-you recall that my father abhorred unpleasant communications. And people who expected to have a dying child on their hands could be unpleasant if they could not have a space in the World's Fair. In this same letter, he sent not only a direct query regarding the Indian Baby Question, but also a photo of the Thibideau Manifestation of Maladie des Jambes. I think he wanted to impress the new client. I stood behind him as he sat in his chair, rubbing his clean, white fingers over the brown and white limbs of the Thibideaux, studying their faces for the most "compelling pathos." I held my breath as I looked at them and began to think perhaps I should have the price of a new ruler and perhaps a pencil as well for my important contribution of The Indian Baby Question. I filed this away for future usefulness.

* * *

We waited for the first bundle of letters from the incubator doctor. The day it came, Mother sent us off with a pie and sandwiches, and we headed for the destinations given us in the country doctors' letters, zigzagging efficiently from our estate to New Orleans, stopping at designated small towns along the way. I secretly packed one of Mother's handkerchiefs, sprinkled with her perfume. I could breathe into this to avoid disease and sad things. This eliminated much of the breath holding, which was beginning to give me headaches.

Twice on the way to New Orleans, Father borrowed a hotel's cellar or basement for a dark room. For a look at the photos, most proprietors lent the impromptu dark rooms for free.

Father kept his word. He earned the extra money he had demanded in that he did indeed weed out inappropriate babies. He stepped skillfully around direct questions of acceptance into the incubator exhibit. If the families were not French, his usual, mild Cajun accent became thick. I noticed that all of the parents were much too frantic about being in a silly fair.

Father would pretend to take photos for the purpose of both beauty and medical measurement, but really it was also to measure the relative shade of a woman's skin, setting me next to her for comparison, posing me under the pretense of holding a tape measure near her belly, something that, of course, the woman could have done herself. If the babies had already been born, he would set them next to some object to measure them by, my little pale hand, of course, in the photo, holding the object of measure: an empty milk bottle, perhaps, or sometimes a large feather, or, if the family had one, a ruler. Of course, if we could see before we got there that the family was the wrong kind-if they tended more toward sepia than cream-we would turn around and not go at all.

If the family pushed to be accepted, to know that their child would get to be in one of the warming boxes-and especially if they began to cry, Father would fall back on his best defense. "Je ne comprends pas,"he would say, shrugging, smiling kindly. Just like for Monsieur Thibideau, but more gently.

* * *

When we arrived in New Orleans, the first batch of photographs complete, we met the woman doctor in an open-air cafe with excellent beignets. I was allowed chicory coffee whenever Mother could not see, and this day was no exception. Other than to request a linen napkin to help with all the powdered sugar, I was polite and did not speak. The woman pored over Father's photographs, very pleased. "Oh, look how pitiful you've made this one look. You've brought out the shadows under her eyes. Your effects with light are impressive!"

Father shrugged, distracted. He smiled at me, wiped the sugar from my cheek with his thumb.

The doctor reached below the table and brought out a deep, narrow wooden box, the size of a baby. She set it on the table between us. "Here is the incubator," she said proudly. "We call it The Box. Easier for the American fair-goers to comprehend." She smirked.

Father, who never paid consistent attention to anyone except me and Mother, nodded and tapped his coffee spoon on the edge of The Box. She pretended not to notice, though I could see she didn't like it.

"Now," she said. "Take this with you and at the next few homes, put the baby in the Box and get some pictures interesting enough for fair posters. You know what I mean by interesting? Don't make any promises, though, remember?"

He nodded, looking out at the Square. She shifted impatiently. Many important people were put off by Father's aloofness.

She readjusted herself, lifted her chin, and shifted her attention to me. "So! Young lady! What are you going to see in New Orleans?"

"Father!" I said. "Can we go see Marie LeVeau, the Voodoo Queen?"

"Well!" she smiled, raising her eyebrows and leaning forward. She spoke to us with animation. "If you really want to see something, there's a little French girl right near here, just on the edge of the Quarter, in fact, who has recently had her arm cut off. She had an infection, you see, and it has become gangrenous."

This woke my father. "Say there!" he said. "This is someone's little girl!"

"Well, that's true, of course," the doctor said, "but without her arm, she becomes an excellent candidate for one of your wonderful and, I must say, expensive photographs."

"No," he said, touching my shoulder, but calmer now. "I meant this is someone's little girl."

"Oh," she said. "I have been indelicate." She sat back and smiled at us, but I did not like her face. "I understand. You fathers with your little girls-you are wise to be careful. You must watch them every minute. Especially in New Orleans." I wondered what she meant by that. How was this place more dangerous? Was this about the little French girl?

"Still," she continued, "it is a good photograph for someone in your profession. Nothing so different from what your little assistant has seen already and interesting fodder for a postcard, I imagine." (An ingratiating smile was directed at me.) "You ought to think about it."

In the end, of course, economics won out. We did go to see the little French girl. Father said I could give her one of my excellent German licorices, since I was so insistent. I was anxious to meet her, too, because I had become a little lonely for other children on this trip. But when we got there, everything changed.

* * *

The girl's father opened the door. He was a tall, very thin man, with a very red face. When my father announced who he was, the man shook Father's hand with both of his own, stooping a little. "Oh forgive us!" he said. "We had forgotten we ever wrote to you! How good of you to come now, but how sad. Still, how could we have known? And where could we have found you to let you know, once you had left?" His mouth shook a little, and my father's eyes looked to one side. I knew this protective strategy well.

"You see," the man said, sitting us down in his small, peculiar parlor. "After we sent for you, one of our little daughters became ill in her arm. It had to be removed, but-well-it was too late . . ." Again the mouth quivered.

Again my father looked to the side. I marveled that this man could be so indelicate. Didn't he know this was an unpleasant conversation? I looked around the house. He was somewhat poor. I forgave him his bad manners.

"Well," the man finished, his voice barely more than a whisper. "We are preparing her now."

I did not understand, but took this to mean that she needed a bath or a hair combing before posing for Father.

"Still," the man said, "now that you're here, if it doesn't offend you, I wonder--"

We waited. He rubbed both hands over his face and when they came down, I saw that he had smeared tears down his cheeks. "Still," he tried again. "Still, if it doesn't offend you, I wonder if, perhaps, we could do the photograph of the girls anyway? Prop her somehow between them?" Then he rushed to explain, afraid of offending: "Then, you see, her mother and I could still see our little Marie-Claire down through the years. We will miss her so."

Father set me in a worn green velvet chair that smelled of fried oyster sandwiches and said, "Don't leave this. You stay right here."

"Am I not to help with this one?" I complained.

"You stay right here. Don't get up."

"Am I not to help?" I whined.

"No."

I waited in the green chair, smelling the not unpleasant smell of the oysters. I remembered what the woman doctor had said: your little girls--you must watch them every minute. I frowned. How could he leave me alone? I would scold him for this later, perhaps when we were near a confectionery.

Before we left New Orleans, Father was allowed to make a quick dark room at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. He added three New Orleans babies and the one-armed Marie-Claire and her sisters to the big black book, the portfolio where he kept all his favorite or newest photographs.

We did try to find Marie LeVeau, but outside a voodoo shop, a strange, dark woman in too many skirts and no shoes tried to sell me a bag of gris-gris. My father slapped it gently from my hands, scowling fiercely at the woman. I saw her nails, on my sleeve, were very long and one was torn. He bought me a molasses stick instead, as we were leaving the Quarter, but gave it to me only after he washed and powdered my hands back at the hotel.

* * *

Our first stop outside of New Orleans was on a bayou. The house was far away from the road, and we had to walk on a wobbly, rotten-looking wooden bridge over swamp land to get to the porch from the road. Spanish moss brushed my face as I passed beneath the trees. I was enjoying myself immensely. I looked for alligators but was disappointed in this. On the porch a tiny slick bag the size and shape of a frog's underbelly-perhaps it was a frog's underbelly-hung from the split porch roof. The bag was glossy and where it stretched thin, I saw beneath its surface the edges of the tiny stones which filled it. The bag looked heavy and wet. My heart began to pound in my ears.

Father saw this and squeezed my hand. "Just silly voodoo medicine," he whispered. "For the ignorant. It cannot hurt you."

Of course it was not our fault.

Because of the remoteness of the house, we were unable to tell until face to face with the father of this tiny home that the family was not suitable-he was Mexican. Very dark. What could we do? Father and I knew, of course, that a Mexican baby was inappropriate; the ink would come out too dark-but there was the father, grasping Father's hands.

He was much younger than Father, with thick black hair, very clean and soft-looking. He would have been handsome except that he was a laborer and he was, well, Mexican, and his face carried too much emotion. His beautiful eyebrows formed an anxious peak at their center that was disagreeable. He shook both our hands, and when he looked into my face, his eyes were full. "I see you have a precious little girl of your own," he said.

I fingered Mother's handkerchief in my pocket and readied it. Could he really compare me to some daughter of his own? I was not, was not, was not like the children Father photographed, except, perhaps, the little French girl.

He pulled us into the house and showed us a tiny parlor with the kitchen right there in the middle of it. At the back was a tiny room, no larger than the pantry at home, but it had a bed in it and at the foot of that a cradle. The man bent and placed the backs of his fingers softly against the tiny form within. I peeked and saw a very small, dark baby forehead peering above the blanket, damp soft black hair sticking to its skin. This baby didn't move, though, or open its eyes, so I studied the room. There was not even room for a straight-back chair or wash stand.

"It just happened," the Mexican man said.

I sensed something important and paid attention.

"My wife, she died in childbirth. This morning-"

"Sh. Sh. Sh," Father said. Such talk about childbirth in front of his little girl. I raised my chin. You must watch them every minute.

"A neighbor has been trying to nurse my baby girl."

"Sh. Sh. Sh." Father frowned gently. Such talk, with me there, about nursing babies. "Shh."

The man nodded, distracted. He kept wringing his hands.

"Well," Father said. "We are very sorry. We just came here to tell you, though, that the Exhibition is full . . ."

The man's mouth fell open.

Father closed his eyes. " . . . that the Exhibition is full and we cannot . . ."

"No!"

Father cleared his throat. His eyes were still closed. "You must understand. There were too many babies, sir, and-"

"My name is Emmanuel."

" . . . Emmanuel. Too many babies, you see, and not enough . . ."

"No!" Emmanuel said. He gripped my father's arm, knocking me back a step, and Father stopped talking. I expected Father to do something about this, to say I was somebody's little girl, to call attention to what had been done to me, but instead he only swallowed, his arm looking thin as a boy's in Emmanuel's grip. I began the funny breathing, but Father did not hear that either, so I stopped.

That's when Emmanuel saw the Box.

"Is that it?" he whispered.

"Yes," Father said.

"Put her in it."

"Now really, there is no sense . . . "

"Put her in it!"

Father set down the Box on the kitchen table, and Emmanuel brought the tiny baby out from the cradle. It was so quiet. It moved to cry when he set it down in the Box, but it was too weak to make the sounds, so it just made a little grimace, gapping its mouth noiselessly. It did not open its eyes. I looked up into Emmanuel's face.

Emmanuel said. "She needs this Box."

Father said nothing.

"Take her picture."

Father sighed. He looked at the floor for a moment and then at the ceiling. He turned abruptly to leave, but Emmanuel stepped between us and the door. I sighed out loud, but Father did not look at me. He set me on a high, bare wooden stool near the front door. His forehead was damp, and his hands were clammy and cold. There were two thin carrots, partially cut, on the cracked wooden counter behind me. Someone had stopped their cooking abruptly, perhaps last night. The carrots were dried and beginning to pucker on the stump ends. I thought of the one-armed Marie-Claire and moved my elbow away from them. I saw that the lace on my sleeve was all dirty.

"Father," I said, "I've been dirtied-"

Father gave me his black portfolio book to occupy me. "We'll be leaving soon, Sweet," he said, but looking sternly at Emmanuel, who still blocked the door. Father looked small and timid. I looked at the portfolio in my hands.

"Am I not to assist this time either?" I complained.

"No."

I opened the book, feeling dangerous because he usually protected me from certain of the "maladie" photographs. Why was it allowed now? I knew I should be excited, but it felt wrong, and as I turned the pages, I let my attention wander between Emmanuel's baby and Father's photographs. Emmanuel stood watching Father set up the camera, talking almost constantly, trying to win.

"Look," Father said. "I will take the photograph. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps when they see your little girl, they may change their minds. But I must tell you, truly, the exhibit is full. You can understand it would be immoral for them to remove some other baby so that your child . . . "

"Esmerelda."

" . . . so that Esmerelda could take their place."

"What about this Box?" Emmanuel said. "There is no other baby in this Box."

"Well, yes, but you see, commitments have been made, papers signed-"

"Would it not be immoral to remove Esmerelda, now that she is in the Box?"

This bored me. I turned a page and there she was! The pretty little French girl with one arm! I remembered then that an injustice had been done. I had not been allowed to see her.

"Father!" I said. "Is this the Marie-Claire? I didn't get to share my licorice!"

Father looked at me. He had forgotten for a minute that I was there. And now I was seeing the girl he had forbidden me to see in the oyster-smelling house.

"Yes, I know, Darling," he said. "Maybe you should put the book down now."

"No, I want to look."

Father retreated behind the camera lens. This was not the effect I had hoped for.

"I will take the photographs," he said. "But then we must go."

"You can't take her out of the Box. Not now that she is in there!"

"Father," I said, studying Marie-Claire's odd white face. "Did it hurt her? When you took her picture? And did you have to set the arm somewhere?"

"What?" He looked at me. "No. Giselle, be quiet now."

"You know what will happen," Emmanuel said, "if you take her out of the Box." I could not tell whether Emmanuel was talking about what would happen to the baby or what would happen to us or both.

I looked back down. "Father, why is her face so white? Did you take the photograph properly?"

"Look at her," Emmanuel said. I kept glancing between Esmerelda and the strange, slumbering Marie-Claire. (Who sleeps, hunched and gray like that, for an expensive portrait? Was she a spoiled child? Or did the lost arm hurt too much?)

"Father, why can't she stand up?"

"See how beautiful she is?" Emmanuel still argued.

"Father, why is she so white?"

"Je ne-" Father said. "Oh, please-" He looked ill. He was white as Marie-Claire, with water on his upper lip. "Would you both please stop talking?" He bent again to the camera. He was paying no attention to me.

"You know what will happen," Emmanuel said.

"Father, what will happen?"

"You cannot remove her now she is in it."

"Did it hurt her, the picture-taking? Answer me. Why is she so white . . ."

And then something bad and cold gripped me in my chest. I knew what was wrong with the Marie-Claire. I thought back to the smell of the oyster sandwich chair. I knew now why the Marie-Claire was so white, and now my black velvet coat smelled dirty, smelled of her mother's fried oysters. I watched my Father, his face wet and gray now, and me, here, alone on this stool, where Emmanuel's young wife had sliced the carrots to dead stumps but now was dead herself. Your little girls-you must watch them every minute. The dizziness I'd had with the Thibideaux was coming back.

I looked for Mother's handkerchief in my dirtied sleeve, but it was gone. I saw it on the floor, far below me. It touched a dirty dead carrot stump. I sniffed at my wrist, but there was no trace of perfume, no trace of soap. So I held my breath, my only choice left, and looked at the back of Father's wet shirt. Your little girls-you must watch them . . .

"You know what will happen if you take her out of that Box, don't you? You know what will happen!"

"What does he mean, Father?" It came out in a whisper.

"You know what will happen."

"Father," I puffed, "what does he mean? What will happen?" But Father didn't answer me. I took another gulp of air and tried a more important question. "Should he talk like that in front of me?" I shifted my glare to Emmanuel and said, "This is someone's little girl!" since Father didn't say it. But Emmanuel only nodded solemnly. He thought I meant the baby! The baby!

I pushed through my dizziness and wobbled off the stool. Father stared only through the lens at Esmerelda, sweat in his eye. I snatched an empty milk bottle off the table and thrust it roughly into the Box, startling both men. I clenched the bottle tight and pushed my pretty pale forearm up against the side of Esmerelda's wrinkly brown form so that Father would have to look at me.

"This is someone's-" I wheezed, then caught the sound of Father's gasp as I thrust myself into the photograph. Your little girls-you have to watch them every minute, I was saying, though it didn't sound like me. My wheezing sounded scary and sad and far away, and I couldn't have Mother's handkerchief, and I was dirtied with Emmanuel's skin and Marie-Claire's oysters and the carrot stumps of the dead woman, and Father wasn't . . . Watch them every minute . . . and I saw suddenly how my pretty, white, white arm in Esmerelda's box must look through Father's lens-like the disembodied arm of Marie-Claire. And so it felt like all three of us little girls were there in the Box as it tipped with my leaning, the world went to sepia, and the cries of the fathers behind us sounded far, far away.

This story was published in River Styx and then reprinted in New Stories From the South 2001.

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