THE BABY CARDS

“My grandfather had evidently sent telegrams … sharing all the happy details and none of the grave concerns.”

My grandfather was a Hoosier farm boy who began his career inspecting onions in Indiana and retired four decades later from behind a desk in Washington, D.C. My grandmother, born in Wisconsin, taught there for one year in a one-room school before making her way to a civil-service job in Atlanta. That job happened to be in the building where my grandfather had started working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They met, married, and barely had time to shake the confetti from their wedding clothes before beginning a lifetime of relocating at the behest of the USDA.

When my brother and I were kids, visiting our grandparents meant annual excursions to wherever they were living—days of being entertained, indulged, and doted on that stick in my memory like color photos. I remember Granny’s elegant crusts-cut-off sandwiches on picnics in the Rockies; her and Grampa’s delight when a blizzard trapped us at their Michigan home for a few extra days. I also have a dimmer recollection: hearing Granny and Momma softly talking about “when Johnny was born.” I must have asked Who’s Johnny?—to which I got a short, gentle answer: My grandparents had had a baby who died.

Granny was 42 when she found out she was pregnant—and every bit as excited as she was surprised. Grampa gleefully calculated the possibility of early retirement to spend time with his second child. My mother was 17, crazy about kids and giddy at the prospect of having an infant to help take care of. “We were all going to raise that baby,” she once told me wistfully.

Johnny arrived very late and very large, delivered a month past his due date, bruised by forceps, frail despite his size. The doctors advised moving him to Denver’s pediatric hospital, but no ambulance was offered; my grandfather had to drive his fragile son a mile through downtown traffic in the family car. He lived a little more than three weeks and never came home.

I learned this in bits and pieces by asking my mother and grandmother over the years. Their answers were always measured, never morose, and I suppose because they spoke so calmly, I never really felt the weight of what had happened. As a child I knew it was sad, but for me Johnny’s existence was intangible, a family story from the distant past. That sense lingered into my adult years—lingered, in fact, until the late 1990s, when my grandparents died just months apart and I found this ribbon-tied stack of cards in a desk drawer.

My grandfather had evidently sent telegrams immediately after Johnny arrived, sharing all the happy details and none of the grave concerns. Cards and notes poured in from all over, including a brisk letter from my great-grandmother—“Sounds like an awful big baby to have born!”—announcing she’d arrive as quickly as the train could get her from Indiana to Colorado. The cards are filled with wishes for a bright future, but tucked among them was a record of how cruelly short that future would be: two faded pink visitor passes from the children’s hospital, stamped for each scant day my grandparents had with their child.

The final date on the visitor passes is a testament to my grandparents’ huge hearts. I was born just two and a half years after Johnny died; my brother followed a few years later. If our arrival reminded them of their loss, they never let it cast a shadow on our time together. They kept their sorrow, like they kept the baby cards, to themselves.

—Linda Vaccariello