Bessie

This story was told to me as told to my mother Betty by her father’s mother, about her father’s mother’s husband’s brother, my great grand uncle Hiram, all people I never met, except my mother, and even that is at times arguable.
Hiram came to New York from Eastern Europe, probably Latvia, where, before he’d left, he secretly (?) married his young love, a girl named Bessie (my great grand aunt), and how Hiram had managed through deep love and diligence to bring Bessie from the old country to New York, where they lived openly and passionately together as man and wife for ten years, childless though they desired children, until Hiram died suddenly before the age of thirty, as had my mother’s father, Benjamin died before the age of thirty. People who knew the couple thought Bessie would die too, she was so sick, so pale, so bereft. She mourned and cried endlessly, but then, thanks be to god, as my mother’s father’s mother would say, after a year she came about, quiet and withdrawn, but alive. And even more amazingly, about two years after Hiram’s death another man, a cousin of Hiram’s with four children of his own whose wife had recently died in childbirth, hired Bessie to care for this newest infant child and in time took Bessie for his wife. Then, not long after their marriage, Bessie announced to the world she was pregnant and less than six months after the wedding went into labor. Only the baby she delivered was clearly not premature, and her husband, who knew he had not known her in the biblical sense, and not had conjugal relations with her before their wedding, though no one else needed to know or would necessarily have deeply cared under their circumstances, forbade Bessie from returning to his house, and she and her baby didn’t, and no one ever knew who the father was, or saw Bessie and her baby again.  And so it was in those days, said Betty, perhaps in her way trying to caution me.