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By Root 31696 0

á never forgave Margo and was mean and spiteful to her after that. If she only wasn't going to have the baby Margo would have run away. Al the castoroil did was to give her ter-rible colic and the quinine just made her ears ring. She stole a sharppointed knife from the kitchen and thought she'd kil herself with it, but she didn't have the nerve to stick it in. She thought of hanging herself by the bedsheet, but she couldn't seem to do that either. She kept the knife under the mattress and lay al day on the bed dreaming about what she'd do if she ever got back to the States and thinking about Agnes and Frank and vaudevil e shows and the Keith circuit and the St. Nicholas rink. Sometimes she'd get herself to believe that this was al a long night-mare and that she'd wake up in bed at home at Indian's. She wrote Agnes every week and Agnes would some-times send her a couple of dol ars in a letter. She'd saved fifteen dol ars in a little al igatorskin purse Tony had given her when they first got to Havana, when he happened to look into it one day and pocketed the money and went out on a party. She was so sunk that she didn't even bawl him out about it when he came back after a night at a rumba-joint with dark circles under his eyes. Those days she was feeling too sick to bawl anybody out.

When her pains began nobody had any idea of taking

her to the hospital. The old women said they knew just what to do, and two Sisters of Mercy with big white but-terfly headdresses began to bustle in and out with basins and pitchers of hot water. It lasted al day and al night and some of the next day. She was sure she was going to die. At last she yel ed so loud for a doctor that they went out and fetched an old man with yel ow hands al knobbed

-247-with rheumatism and a tobaccostained beard they said was a doctor. He had goldrimmed eyeglasses on a ribbon that kept fal ing off his long twisted nose. He examined her and said everything was fine and the old women grinning and nodding stood around behind him. Then the pains grabbed her again; she didn't know anything but the pain. After it was al over she lay back so weak she thought she must be dead. They brought it to her to look at but she wouldn't look. Next day when she woke up she heard a thin cry beside her and couldn't imagine what it was. She was too sick to turn her head to look at it. The old women were shaking their heads over something, but she didn't care. When they told her she wasn't wel enough to nurse it and that it would have to be raised on a bottle she didn't care either.

A couple of days passed in blank weakness. Then she was able to drink a little orangejuice and hot milk and could raise her head on her elbow and look at the baby when they brought it to her. It looked dreadful y little. It was a little girl. Its poor little face looked wrinkled and old like a monkey's. There was something the matter with its eyes. She made them send for the old doctor and he sat on the edge of her bed looking very solemn and wiping and wiping his eyeglasses with his big clean silk handkerchief. He kept cal ing her a poor little niña and final y made her understand that the baby was blind and that her husband had a secret disease and that as soon as she was wel enough she must go to a clinic for treatments. She didn't cry or say anything but just lay there staring at him with her eyes hot and her hands and feet icy. She didn't want him to go, that was al she could think of. She made him tel her al about the disease and the treatment and made out to un-derstand less Spanish than she did, just so that he wouldn't go away. A couple of days later the old women put on their best

-248-black silk shawls and took the baby to the church to be christened. Its little face looked awful blue in the middle of al the lace they dressed it in. That night it turned almost black. In the morning it was dead. Tony cried and the old women al carried on and they spent a lot of money on a little white casket with silver handles and a hearse and a priest for the funeral. Afterwards the Sisters of Mercy came and prayed beside her bed and the priest came and talked to the old women in a beautiful tragedy voice like Frank's voice when he wore his morningcoat, but Margo just lay there in the bed hoping she'd die too, with her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight together. No matter what anybody said to her she wouldn't answer or open her eyes.