First Pearl

Helen Harvey was my mother then. She was the first one I saw when the great egg of a subway car I rode to a new life birthed me to Chicago’s South Side, to St. Bernard’s Hospital where I would be a physical therapy intern. I saw Helen waiting for me there and like a duckling who imprints on a dog I followed her everywhere.

The hospital had told me to expect someone at the subway that first day, someone to escort me back through the maze of projects, past addicts and bullets. Of course they didn’t say those things, but I knew. Kara from the class ahead of me had been taken off the train at knife point early one sunny morning and pushed down into the cracked walls of the station platform, into the musty dark and dampness, and made to do everything her mother told her never to do. She was left there with old newspaper and urine at her feet and not even a dime to call home.

So Helen was an angel to me. Her gallons of dark coffee skin were poured neatly into the starched white nurse’s dress she wore. Her sturdy white shoes hugged her spirited steps. A rose of a smile bloomed under the fullness of her ebony wig.

“Hello, child. I’m Helen Harvey. Come right this way.”

Helen hugged me to her as we passed through the subway station. She made sure that certain people saw us together as I’d be passing that way alone in the days to come.

“Gerald,” she said to the musician slouching low on a post in the middle of the station. His trumpet yawned by his side. His eyes were half open, but when he heard her voice he straightened up.

“Miss Harvey,” he replied.

“Jeffrey,” she said to the fare taker. “Miss Harvey.”

“Booker.” The newsman at the top of the subway stairs. “Miss Harvey.”

“William.” The guard at the hospital door. “Miss Harvey.”

St. Bernard's Hospital was a miracle, really. The tree that would not fall as the forest died around it. A promise of hope. Helen Harvey was its heart. She was the voice of the ghetto at its threshold and the voice of healing to her people. Helen was always at the doorway, coaxing the needy in for help and sending home the healthy.

She was born at St. Bernard's, 70 years before and grew up right next door. It was a time, she said, when people drank lemonade on hot summer nights and boys sang a capella outdoors.

“I met Johnson there, on that corner. He sang bass that made my belly flutter,” she told me.

Helen married and had five boys with Johnson. All fine. Through college. In business of their own. Helen loved them deeply—gave them more than sugar, I could see. Those apples fell straight to the base of their tree and grew into apple trees strong and full, in a circle of love around her.

Late in the afternoon, when fluids accumulated in her ankles and her feet swelled well out of her shoes, Helen would sit in our huge office in an end chair, her feet propped up on a wooden coffee table, the top button of her uniform undone. She had made a pact with George, our boss: “Feet up at four” and he agreed because he loved her so.

Helen loved to catch me as I passed her. I’d come around the corner, dashing off to knead Loretta whose arthritis had bound her much too tight and Helen would snag me by the hips and pull me down into the softness of her great lap. The lap that Johnson rest his head in after cracking asphalt all day. The place he called heaven. And she’d hold me like a child in her strong arms and coo, “You got the child bearing body, girl.” The first time she did that, I said “Helen!” so sharply she laughed.

“Can’t deny it. God made you what he made you and you look like an assembly line in Detroit from what I can see,” she laughed.

After that I sat still and felt the power of her body, her seventy years pressed honestly to my twenty and let her tell me all her truths—how birthing was a miracle and at the same time just another riff in life’s rhythm.

“It will grab you, child, and rock you like a river in spring. It swells and fades and wraps around you, down inside you. It gets tight when the banks get closer and eases with the widening. Just when you slap the shore and run over, there on the bank is your child, your pearl. Pick him up now. God left him there for you.”

Helen made me crave children like fine chocolates or pâté. She made me wish for a man and the rhythm of a river that would wash a necklace of pearls onto my shore. I wanted Helen with me in a log canoe. Wanted her to ride my rapids, read my waters. Dry and polish my pearl.

She would have carved me that canoe if she’d had the time, but when I left Helen at internship’s end I left her with God. She’d moved on and left all of us at St. Bernard's and in the worry around it calling out her name to the sky instead of Jesus’.

Years later, when my river began to rush, I remembered Helen. My husband and I laughed, expecting an easy run, when suddenly a tree fell into my stream and there was water everywhere. People swam around me and folded me in half.

“Hold on,” they cried as though I could keep this river tucked between my chest and knees for even a moment.

They strapped me down, hands bound with velcro and a mask over my face. Prepped for emergency surgery, the anesthesia quickly made my body dead from the chest down.

“I’m not breathing,” I said and nobody listened, not even the gray haired doctor in the green suit.

“I’m not breathing,” I said and my husband behind me sobbing didn’t hear.

And in the longest moment, as my vision began to shrink in from the edges and one thin nurse moved for a throat tube I looked to my feet and saw Helen, polished ebony and white linen.

‘I’m not breathing,” I said to her and she to me:

“Hush, child.”

And my husband shouted, “Is it dead? I don’t hear crying!”

“You done real good,” said Helen.

And in the mirror on the OR wall I saw my first son, wide-eyed and breathing. A rosy apple. My first pearl.

“Is it dead?” my husband cried.

“He’s fine,” I said as I went under.