The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [32]
Memorial Service
For Our Beloved Daughter
Phoebe Grace Henry
Born and Died March 7, 1964
Lexington Presbyterian Church
Friday, March 13, 1964, at 9 a.m.
Caroline sat down slowly. She read the words once and then again. She even touched them, as if this would make them clearer somehow, explicable. With the paper still in her hands, she stood up and went to the bedroom. Phoebe slept in her drawer, one pale arm outflung against the blankets. Born and died. Caroline went back into the living room and called her office. Ruby picked up on the first ring.
“I don’t suppose you’re coming in?” she said. “It’s a madhouse here. Everyone in town seems to have the flu.” She lowered her voice then. “Did you hear, Caroline? About Dr. Henry and his babies? They had twins after all. The little boy is fine; he’s precious. But the girl, she died at birth. So sad.”
“I saw it in the paper.” Caroline’s jaw, her tongue, felt stiff. “I wonder if you’d ask Dr. Henry to call me. Tell him it’s important. I saw the paper,” she repeated. “Tell him that, will you, Ruby?” Then she hung up and sat staring out at the sycamore tree and the parking lot beyond.
An hour later he knocked at her door.
“Well,” she said, showing him in.
David Henry came in and sat on her sofa, his back hunched, turning his hat in his hand. She sat down in the chair across from him, watching him as if she’d never seen him before.
“Norah put the announcement in,” he said. When he looked up she felt a rush of sympathy despite herself, for his forehead was lined, his eyes bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “She did it without telling me.”
“But she thinks her daughter died,” Caroline said. “That’s what you told her?”
He nodded, slowly. “I meant to tell her the truth. But when I opened my mouth, I couldn’t say it. At that moment, I thought I was saving her pain.”
Caroline thought of her own lies, streaming out one after the other.
“I didn’t leave her in Louisville,” she said softly. She nodded at the bedroom door. “She’s in there. Sleeping.”
David Henry looked up. Caroline was unnerved, for his face was white; she had never before seen him shaken.
“Why not?” he asked, on the edge of anger. “Why in the world not?”
“Have you been there?” she asked, remembering the pale woman, her dark hair falling into the cold linoleum. “Have you seen that place?”
“No.” He frowned. “It came highly recommended, that was all. I’ve sent other people there, in the past. I’ve heard nothing negative.”
“It was awful,” she said, relieved. So he hadn’t known what he was doing. She wanted to hate him still, but she remembered how many nights he had stayed at the clinic, treating patients who couldn’t afford the care they needed. Patients from the countryside, from the mountains, who made the arduous trip to Lexington, short on money, long on hope. The other clinic partners hadn’t liked it, but Dr. Henry had not stopped. He wasn’t an evil man, she knew that. He wasn’t a monster. But this—a memorial service for a living child—that was monstrous.
“You have to tell her,” she said.
His face was pale, still, but determined. “No,” he said. “It’s too late now. Do whatever you have to do, Caroline, but I can’t tell her. I won’t.”
It was strange; she disliked him so much for these words, but she felt with him also at that moment the greatest intimacy she had ever felt with any person. They were joined together now in something enormous, and no matter what happened they always would be. He took her hand, and this felt natural to her, right. He raised it to his lips and kissed it. She felt the press of his lips on her knuckles and his breath, warm on her skin.
If there had been any calculation in his expression when he looked up, anything less than pained confusion when he released her hand, she would have done the