Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [53]
Weeze did her best to be a spirited companion, but the burden of her secret and the certainty that Spence could never accept Johnny’s deafness had, after three long months, grown intolerable. “She seemed to have lost her interest in everything except the baby,” Spence recounted. “But even that was not a happy interest. She would sit and watch him and brood. For weeks I kept asking her to tell me what was the matter. But it was always the same answer, ‘Nothing.’ One Sunday morning I went in the baby’s room and found her sobbing as though her heart would break. I insisted that she tell me. She didn’t answer at first. She went and bathed her eyes and straightened her hair and then came back and sat down in a rocker. She sat there a minute, staring into space, rocking and rocking. I’ve never seen such tragedy on a human face. Suddenly she said, very quietly, ‘Johnny can’t hear. He’s deaf.’ ”
The news hit him like nothing else he had ever heard in his life. As Louise remembered it, “he just broke down.” He buried his face in his hands, and then, after a moment, he said brokenly, “He’ll never be able to say Daddy.” At that, Louise was suddenly able to do for him what she had been unable to do for herself. “Words of encouragement came tumbling out. Thoughts of which I had never before been conscious rushed into speech. How much closer he would be to us, how much more we could do for him, how much more we had to work for, the miracles of science doctors constantly were performing, what was unheard of today might in twenty years be as simple as breathing. Hope, hope, hope, I poured into his ears, and hope crept into my heart, never to leave. We wept uncontrollably for a few moments and were strangely comforted.”
They decided at last that they couldn’t let it spoil all three of their lives, and Spence said, “Let’s see if we can get Emily to sit with John. Let’s go down to the park.” They spent that night convincing themselves that Johnny’s deafness didn’t matter, that he was still an intelligent, happy baby who was otherwise in perfect health, and that they would somehow find a way to see that he lived a normal life. But privately, spiritually, Spence needed to make sense of it, what had happened to his son and why. “You could never pin him down to just what he believed,” Louise said. “He never liked to talk about the church, but he believed it. He had grown up that way, and he [was] settled [in his faith]…I felt that [his father] was more flexible in some ways, that he had a little broader [interpretation] where my husband took it as it was and didn’t discuss it. And what he thought, I don’t know. He never talked about those things, excepting the general thing that he didn’t see how anybody could say there wasn’t a God.”
Tracy had committed adultery—emotionally, if not carnally, with Selena, and physically, it would seem, with Betty Hanna. And possibly with others over the long months of Louise’s pregnancy. It was not something he could ever take lightly, given his Catholic upbringing, and he may, in fact, have given some account of his behavior in confession. The guilt he felt was corrosive in its effect on his mind and his sense of well-being. It was something he couldn’t discuss with Louise, something he couldn’t let out of himself, something he carried with him at all times. The Irish stream of Catholicism being so severe and demanding, he was keenly aware of how easily the gifts of God could be forsaken, their goodness traduced through the ever-present threat of sin. But that the greatest gift of all, his son, could be so afflicted was something he could never understand or justify, and something for which