The Hatbox Baby
   Carrie Brown
  2000 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, USA
   ISBN: 1565122992


On a sweltering summer morning in 1933, a baby is delivered in a hatbox to the Infantorium at the World's Fair in Chicago & a mystery of love & redemption is begun among the freaks & marvels at the Century of Progress Exposition.

Somewhere in that hot midwestern city, a young woman is giving birth with the help of a neighboring midwife, to an infant unlikely to survive. The father, in desperation snatches up the still living babe & rushes off to the World's Fair because he'd read about a doctor there who could save premature babies.

At the Century of Progress, where everything has been built on a somewhat smaller scale than the real thing & where all manner of exhibits entice the milling fairgoers into strange & fascinating worlds of science, flim-flam & gambling, the notion of what is “normal” & what is not comes into question daily where freaks & marvels, miracles & murder abound.

St. Louis, so named because that's where he was born, is one of those freaks who is lounging around in the dawn, waiting to go back to work when a confused young man clutching a hatbox, stumbles into him. It is St. Louis who leads him to Dr. Hoffman's Infantorium.

Dr. Leo Hoffman, part showman & part scientist, finances his neonatal research by exhibiting a collection of live premature babies in their newfangled incubators. Alice is his long-time assistant & the Registered Nurse in charge of the nursery with its rows of glistening incubators & its bevy of simple, compassionate wet nurses. Hour after hour lines of awed & enchanted citizens tramp quietly through.

In the exhibit next door to the Infantorium, Caro Day performs her exotic fan dance to packed houses, while her deformed cousin. St. Louis, acts as barker & doorman. Caro & St. Louis have come a long way from their family's farm in Virginia & both are, in their own way, wondering where next they will go.

Caro Day & Dr. Hoffman meet when a stampeding riot passes outside their exhibits & a young man is senselessly stabbed before their eyes. The hatbox under his arm falls with him. There in the dusk, Dr. Hoffman & Caro kneel to offer the stranger comfort as he bleeds out in the dust of a make-believe Parisian street. It is Alice who connects this young man to their latest charge.

It is the life of a tiny baby, born too early, that brings strangers together in a bond of desperate hope, frantic searches & escapes & heartwarming redemption in a far-away time that our grandparents might remember.

A beautifully researched & written adventure of a special time & a particularly strange place: The World's Fair of 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. One fascinating read!

More from Carrie Brown: Rose's Garden & Lamb in Love.
(04/29/01)

Rebecca