day when she drank tea and then felt her stomach turn at the sight of some smoked eel. It was about time, said Mrs. Lear, and then she insisted (“for the sake of the child”) on reviewing Margaret’s recent history with an eye to ascertaining “the breeding date,” and, “my dear, the foaling date.” She said, “These things do not happen by themselves, as much as you might be led to believe that they do. My own mother told me that she did not understand how she came to have nine children until at least number seven, when some ladies in her sewing circle took pity on her and told her. But it’s best to be well informed and not turn your modest gaze away from the whole subject, as so many are tempted to do.” She estimated that Margaret was about six weeks along, which would make for an early-fall “foaling date”—“Not at all bad, though when the time comes to take the infant out for air, you’ll have a bit of rain, but we shall consider that when we must.”
Each day, she intended to tell Andrew what she suspected, but failed to do so. “Breedings,” as she now thought of them, were neither frequent nor easy. Some days, she made the case to herself that the very rarity of these events was reason enough to tell him that an effort had been crowned with success. Was Andrew any more knowledgeable about “breeding” and “foaling” than Mrs. Lear reported her mother to have been? Possibly not. This was her excuse. What she didn’t tell Mrs. Lear was that there seemed to be no way actually to produce the child she imagined, whose face came into her mind unbidden, simply a face, appealing but remote, with no maleness or femaleness attached to it.
“Goodness me!” exclaimed Mrs. Lear. “You look so shocked, my girl. Shocked every day. But of course you do! I cried my eyes out the first time. Captain Lear had me in Lima, Peru, and for a while it looked like China, if you can imagine that. But you do get used to it. It may take years and one child after another, but you do get used to it. I am not saying, into your ears only, that I don’t sometimes find it a relief that Captain Lear is off to sea again next month, because I do, though of course he is a wonderful man, all things taken together.”
Margaret walked about the island, and then about the town, staring at the children, boys and girls, young and old, being carried and walking by themselves, running, skipping, rolling hoops and playing marbles, fishing in the bay, and working, too, since the general population of Vallejo was enormously varied, and plenty of children were selling fruits and vegetables and eggs and newspapers and tobacco, or shining shoes or driving carts or riding horses or carrying things home wrapped in paper. She began to feel quite sanguine about the foaling, which would be followed by another breeding, and then another foaling, and then another breeding, and so on. Whatever Andrew’s propensities with regard to marital relations, he clearly understood that marriages produced children, and, according to the evidence of his jovial pleasure in the Lear boys, he was bound to greet her news with pleasure, but still she didn’t tell him.
It was almost March, her first in California. The rain poured down and the fog closed in. When the sound of the rain was not blocking out every other (except, of course, the constant clanging and roaring from the ship factories, but she had gotten used to that), the fog brought in a litany—ships calling to one another as they crossed the bay, ferry whistles and shouts of men, officers calling orders to sailors over in the quarters, bantering and laughing from the street. Once in a while, she heard someone singing. Even the calls of birds emerged from all the racket, especially at those fugitive moments when human sounds had suddenly fallen silent, and a crow would squawk or a heron would cluck or a goldfinch would carry on a conversation right outside her window.
She began to feel what Mrs. Lear referred to as “morning sickness,” though these bouts did not take place in the morning. On the third or fourth evening of this, she was reading by the electric light, and she felt the strongest surge of nausea yet. Her first thought was that she should not