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"My sister told me your name was Eugenia. What difference does it make here anyway?" she snapped and started down right.
"It makes a big difference to me," I stated. All the while I had been at the hotel, Grandmother Cutler had tried to force me to accept the name Eugenia, the name of another one of her sisters, one who had died of smallpox. She had even gone so far as to cut off all food to me until I accepted the name, but I refused and she gave up when I discovered how she had arranged for my abduction.
Now that I was in trouble and desperate, she was going to have her way with me.
"Come along," Miss Emily ordered.
"Good night, Charlotte," I said. "I guess I will see you in the morning."
"I guess you will," she said and laughed again. She plucked up her skirt with her fingers and spun around. "I'm wearing Daddy's slippers," she cried.
"Charlotte!" Miss Emily screamed.
Charlotte dropped her skirt and gazed with frightened eyes in Miss Emily's direction. Then she spun around and hurried off in the opposite direction, that peal of childlike laughter trailing behind her.
"Come," Miss Emily repeated, glaring angrily in Charlotte's direction for a moment. Then she turned abruptly and we went down a long corridor to the right and turned a corner which took us down another corridor toward the rear of the building. The house was truly enormous. With its long, wide hallways dark, however, I couldn't appreciate any of the old artwork or the antique mirrors and tables. Above us hung unlit chandelier after chandelier, their crystal bulbs all looking more like pieces of ice in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. As we walked, I noticed that the doors to all the rooms, and there seemed to be an endless number, were all shut tight. I knew that some had been closed for a long time because there were cobwebs between the doors and the jambs.
Finally, Miss Emily stopped at an opened doorway and waited for me to approach.
"This is where you will stay," she said, holding the light so that I could gaze into the room.
It had to be one of the smaller ones, I thought. There was a narrow bed against the wall on the left. It had no headboard. It was just a mattress on a metal frame. Beside it was a bare night stand with a kerosene lamp. The floors of the room were wooden slats covered by a small, dark blue oval rug at the foot of the bed. The walls were dark gray. The remaining furniture was simple—a plain dresser with nothing on it and a small table with two chairs. There were no mirrors. I saw a closet on the right with two empty hangers dangling inside and there was another door down right.
"This is your bathroom," Miss Emily said, directing the light of the kerosene lamp at that door. "All right, go on in," she ordered.
I walked in slowly ahead of her. Even my little room away from the family at the Cutler's Cove Hotel was a palace compared to this, I thought. And then I realized what it was that made the room so depressing. There was no window. How could there be a room without a window?
"Why isn't there a window?" I asked. She didn't reply. Instead she went to the dresser, put her lamp on top, and pulled open the top drawer. She reached in and drew out a plain gray gown made of cotton. It reminded me of a hospital gown. She tossed it on the bed.
"Put this on when we're finished," she said. "Finished?"
"This is your light," she said, indicating the small lamp on the night stand. "The matches are here," she said, picking them up and then putting them down. "You have just so much kerosene a week so don't waste it."
"Isn't there any place nicer?" I asked. "There's no window here."
"It isn't for you to choose your room," she said sharply. "This isn't a hotel."
"But why was a room made without a window?" I pursued. She put her hands on her hips and glared at me.
"If you must know, this room was built long after the house had been completed. It was built especially for sick people, to keep them isolated from the others," she said. "Especially during the terrible smallpox epidemics and the epidemic of Spanish flu."
"But I'm not sick; I'm pregnant. Being pregnant isn't being sick," I protested, tears now burning under my eyelids.
"Pregnant like you are without a husband is the same as being sick," she replied. "There are all sorts of sicknesses, sicknesses of the soul as well as of the body. Disgrace can weaken and kill a person as quickly as any disease. Now take off your clothes so I can see how far along you are."
"What?" I stepped back.
"I told you; I have been a midwife. Everyone for miles and miles around here calls me instead of any doctor. I've delivered dozens of babies and all safely and well, except for those that were sick in the mother's stomach. Quickly," she snapped. "I have other things to do yet tonight."
"But it's so cold in here," I complained. "Where is the heat?"
"You have an extra blanket under the bed if you need it. Before I go to sleep," she added in a relenting voice, "I will bring you a hot water bottle. That's how we all sleep here and always have. We save the wood and coal for the stove in the kitchen. I've only got Luther now and I can't have him chopping wood all day to keep this house warm and coal costs money."
She lit the kerosene lamp on the night stand and turned expectantly toward me.
"I thought I would have a doctor," I said, "and be taken to a hospital at the right time. I was recently in an accident. I was hit by a car and I just got out of a hospital," I added, but she simply stared at me as if I hadn't said a word, stared and waited, her eyes fixed on me with the same cold, glassy glaze Grandmother Cutler had.
"I can't do what has to be done for you if I don't know what you need," she finally said.
