Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [27]
“She’s pregnant,” Tante Denise yelled, pulling the sheet and nightgown aside to show him Marie Micheline’s stomach.
My uncle gasped at the sight. Marie Micheline’s belly was small but heavily veined. Still it looked as though it might soon creep up and swallow the space occupied by her breasts.
“How many months?” he asked.
“Seven,” Marie Micheline answered, now cradling the belly between her hands. She purposely kept her eyes down, doing her best not to look at a fuming Tante Denise.
“What have we ever done to you?” Tante Denise cried out in a strained, high-pitched voice. “Haven’t we taken care of you from the time you were a baby?”
Marie Micheline sat up and lowered her feet off the bed.
“I knew it,” she shouted. “I knew you’d act like this. I’m pregnant, not ungrateful.”
My uncle raised his hands, signaling for them to quiet down. Then he motioned for Liline and me to leave the room.
“Who’s the father?” we heard him ask as we left.
Liline and I didn’t wander too far from the doorway. The father, Marie Micheline stammered, was Jean Pradel, the oldest of five brothers who lived across the alley from us. Jean had four brothers, our neighbors often whispered, because his mother had been in pursuit of a girl.
The Pradel boys were handsome young men, well built and, thanks to the financial gains from their mother’s ice and soda shop and their father’s tailoring business, well educated. Their father was somber and fussy and was always well groomed, spending the days when he wasn’t working in a rocking chair on his immaculate front porch.
“Does Jean know he’s the father?” my uncle asked. “Will he deny it and humiliate us? Or will he own up to it like a man?”
“I don’t know,” Marie Micheline answered.
“Get up and get dressed,” my uncle said. “We’re going to have a visit with Monsieur and Madame Pradel.”
Liline and I scattered as they left Marie Micheline’s room and began to move toward us. While Marie Micheline dressed, Tante Denise and Uncle Joseph waited in front of her bedroom door, not saying a word to one another.
Marie Micheline came out in her too-large white nursing school uniform. Her belly was still undetectable under her clothes, but now she put less effort into hiding it, letting her body move naturally in a way that clearly showed her struggles with sluggishness and the extra weight.
Sandwiched between the only parents she’d ever known, she slowly walked toward the Pradels.
The meeting didn’t last long. When they returned, we could tell by the angry look on Tante Denise’s and Uncle Joseph’s faces and by Marie Micheline’s despondent gaze that Jean Pradel had denied being the father.
“See what you get when you lie down with pigs,” Tante Denise said loud enough for the Pradels to hear as they sat huddled at a table by their front door.
“Get your things,” Tante Denise told Marie Micheline. “You’re going to live with one of my cousins in Léogâne. We’ll send you money and food. You can come back when the baby’s born.”
“Let’s not be rash,” Uncle Joseph interjected. “We can go back and see what the boy says. He’d obviously not told his parents and was taken by surprise.”
“This is women’s business,” Tante Denise said. “Let me take care of it.”
We were not allowed to say good-bye to Marie Micheline when she left the next day. Many of our neighbors assumed she was sent abroad to join Maxo. Tante Denise did not send her to Léogâne either, but to live with Liline’s mother in a distant and destitute part of town. Soon the Pradels also sent Jean to Montreal, where he had some relatives, and we never saw him again.
During the two months that Marie Micheline was gone, Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise visited her several times but never took any of us children with them. After one of the visits I overheard Tante Denise telling her sister Léone that Marie Micheline, heartbroken over Jean Pradel’s rejection, had gotten married in a civil ceremony.
“Who would marry a pregnant girl?” asked Léone.
“A kind man who wants to give an abandoned child a name,” Tante Denise answered proudly.
“He must want something,