by Anita Shreve
Telesphore puts his head in his hands. Albertine flings her head back against her chair.
“I therefore issue the following decree, endorsed upon the writ of habeas corpus.”
Albertine begins to sob, a deep, continuous sound.
Littlefield, obviously rattled, clears his throat. “On ten March 1904, this cause having been heard upon the returns and amended return, suggestions and further suggestions, filed by the respective parties, and remaining of record, and upon the evidence, written and oral, adduced before the court, it is considered that the within named infant, Pierre Francis Haskell, has been unlawfully restrained of his liberty and detained by the parties to whom the within writ is directed, or any or either of them, and that the said infant be remanded and restored to his mother, Olympia Biddeford, in the said writ named.”
“He is yours,” Tucker says beside her.
“Bailiff,” says Judge Littlefield, removing his glasses and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Bring in the boy.”
Sears is on his feet. “Your Honor, may the mother and father say a last farewell to the boy?”
Littlefield pinches the bridge of his nose. “The foster parents may say good-bye to the boy, but I forbid them to upset him. If Mrs. Bolduc and her husband cannot control themselves, I will have them removed from the chamber. I do not wish a spectacle on my hands.”
“Your Honor,” says Sears, “may Mr. and Mrs. Bolduc bid farewell to the boy in private?”
“No, the court cannot permit that. What happens shall happen before all.”
• • •
The door at the back of the chamber opens, and the bailiff appears with his charge. The boy is dressed in a navy coat and cap, with long gray stockings leading into the same broken leather shoes. With eyes wide, he glances around, perhaps slightly apprehensive, but excited, as if sensing an outing. Olympia watches as Albertine, with extraordinary selflessness, attempts to compose herself so as not to frighten the boy. She stands and slips the rosary into the pocket of her black suit. Telesphore, behind her, stands with his shoulders severely slumped, as though his back were broken. Sears steps out into the aisle and moves around the table behind Telesphore.
The bailiff brings the boy past Haskell, who holds himself as if at church or at some solemn occasion requiring respect. The resemblance between the boy and the father is so acute that Olympia thinks that all must now see. The boy looks quizzically at Olympia and Tucker and Littlefield and then, midway down the aisle, spots his foster mother.
“Maman,” he cries, breaking loose. “Maman.”
He runs on fat legs along the aisle to Albertine. With an instinctive gesture, long practiced, Albertine bends and picks up the boy and holds him tightly to her breast. He burrows into the wool of Albertine’s suit. And then she holds him slightly away from her, his legs hooked around her waist, his arms around her neck. She speaks to the boy in French, and he cocks his head slightly to the side, as if pondering his mother’s instructions. But when he looks at his mother’s face again — red and swollen — Olympia can see that he senses something is not as it should be. Albertine turns and hands the boy to Telesphore, who buries his huge head in the boy’s neck, unwilling to have the child see his devastation. With a quick kiss on the cheek, he gives his foster son back to Albertine. The sleeves of Albertine’s misshapen suit envelop the child. Her hat slides off her head. The entire room seems on the verge of some large and terrible explosion.
And then, though minutes pass — and it is too soon, even Olympia can feel that it is too soon — Albertine is forced to help the boy slide down off her body. She turns him around so that he is facing Olympia.
Albertine fixes Olympia with a stony look. Her face is puffed and raw. The boy, bewildered, does not move. The aisle might be a chasm. The bailiff once again takes the boy’s hand.
“Maman?” the boy calls over his shoulder, questioning.
It seems an obscenity to Olympia to hold out her own arms in Albertine’s presence, but she must welcome the boy somehow. She crouches down so that she is his height. She says his name.
“Pierre.”
The boy studies this new person before him. Why has his mother told him to go with her? Perhaps she is a friend of his mother’s? But if she is a friend, why are Maman and Papa crying?
“Maman?” he calls again over his shoulder.
Olympia reaches out a hand and touches the boy. Tentatively, he moves in closer to her.
A terrible sob — elemental and primitive — escapes Albertine.
The boy freezes, as if suddenly comprehending the meaning of the small tableau.
“Non!” he cries, pushing Olympia’s hand away. He runs back to his mother, who bends double over him, sheltering him in the folds of her skirt.
A long moment passes.
“Bailiff,” says Littlefield with obvious reluctance.
The bailiff, his face red, clearly hating this job, awkwardly reaches in to try to snatch the boy.
“Mr. Sears,” says Littlefield. “Please speak to your client.”
Sears reaches around Telesphore and touches Albertine on the arm.
Albertine straightens, then bends to face the boy. She speaks to him and points to Olympia. The child is silent. Albertine tilts her foster son’s chin upward so that she and he are gazing directly into each other’s eyes.
From across the aisle, Olympia can see the look that passes between mother and child — a look that will have to last a lifetime, a lifetime of lost days, a lifetime of days that must now always be something less.
Olympia glances up at Tucker, who has gone gray in the face with this responsibility. She searches down the aisle for Haskell, who stands tight-lipped, his hands folded in front of him. And then she dares to look again at Albertine Bolduc, who in this moment will lose the child who has been her son. The anguish is more than any woman should be forced to endure, more than another woman can bear to watch.
“No,” says Olympia.
The bailiff glances up at Olympia and then over at Littlefield.
Olympia stands. “Do not.”
Tucker puts a hand on her arm.
“Miss Biddeford?” Littlefield asks with some bewilderment.
“I withdraw my petition,” Olympia says quickly.
“But Miss Biddeford, a judgment has been entered on your behalf.”
“I will not take him,” she says.
“Miss Biddeford.”
“I cannot.”
Albertine is cradling the boy. Olympia turns and walks briskly down the aisle past Haskell, who does not speak or attempt to stop her. She moves through the massive doors of the chamber and out into the stone hallway with its bronze busts. Her heels clicking loudly, she walks the length of the hallway to the door of the courthouse and opens it. She flinches, having forgotten the mob that has been waiting for her. Quickly now, so as not to lose her resolve, she makes her way blindly through the reporters and the men with signs. She emerges onto the sidewalk, turns, and moves as fast as she can to the next corner. And it is only then, with the crowd behind her and all her life before her, that she truly understands what she was meant to have known from the very beginning. He is not hers. He was never hers.
YOU MUST NOT hold your breath. You must breathe each time you get the pain.”
The girl grunts with a sound hardly human. The thin blond hair is wet and matted against her forehead. Both the calico shift and the bedclothes are rough and wrinkled with perspiration. If it were not so near the end, Olympia would change them yet again.
Occasionally, the girl’s father, in overalls and woolen shirt, his face unshaven, comes to the door and looks in, though he seems to do this out of duty and not from any desire to see his daughter. Olympia prays that the child to come is not the product of the father and the girl. Earlier, the girl told Olympia she was fifteen, which Olympia guesses is correct. There seems not to have been a mother for at least a decade.
The girl grunts again and pulls on the sheet that
has been tied to the post at the foot of the bed for this purpose. Olympia anoints the girl’s vulva with lard and gently examines the progress being made by the descent of the head. Earlier, Olympia covered the horsehair mattress with a sheet of rubber and then spread old newspapers all along that to absorb the birth matter. She has brought with her clean flannels, scissors, coarse sewing cotton, muslin, and a paper of safety pins, all of which she has laid out upon the only table in the room. She has washed the girl’s nipples with a solution of strong green tea and made her a birthing skirt out of yet another clean sheet. Olympia soaks the washcloth in the ice-cold water the father has been bringing from the well, wrings it out, and places it on the girl’s forehead.
“Go look out onto the road,” Olympia says to the father, who seems to need occupation. “He must be coming soon.”
Olympia fears that the girl’s pelvis will be too narrow. Olympia could possibly manage the birth herself, but she would rather that Haskell were here with his greater experience and his forceps. Already the girl has been in labor for twenty hours, and her strength is nearly depleted.
Olympia glances around the room. Some attempt, she can see, has been made at cheer, although the girl is clearly not a skilled housekeeper. Faded red curtains, misshapen from many washings, are fastened onto the two windows of the room with small nails hammered into the frames. On the floor is an oiled cloth, the design of which has nearly been erased by wear. A knitted blanket, with several holes, is folded at the foot of the bed, away from the mess of the birth. But even these touches of human habitation cannot hide the rude truth of the room, one of only two in this small cabin so far from town. The walls are not plastered, and the beams of the peaked roof are exposed. With no wardrobe, the girl and the man hang their clothes on wooden pegs. Outside, Olympia can hear the bleating of sheep, a constant but not unpleasant sound.
And then she hears another sound, a motor, distant at first, fading away altogether and then louder as it makes its way up the rutted dirt road. The girl is lucky in giving birth this week; in another week, the roads will be so muddy that no motorcar will make it at all. Olympia sees a flash of scarlet and beige and waits for the familiar thunk of the automobile door.
Haskell enters the house without knocking, a habit he cannot break even when they go visiting.
“Olympia,” he says when he comes into the bedroom. He sets down his satchel and slips off his coat. He puts his hand on her shoulder. It is his need, Olympia knows, to reassure himself that she is still there, even after all these years.
“She is wanting to bear down,” Olympia says. “But her pelvis, I think, is too narrow.”
“How far along is she?”
“Past half a dollar.”
Haskell walks to the table where the basin is, rolls his cuffs, and washes his hands, exclaiming at how icy the water is. Olympia glances at his broad back. His hair is graying some now, even though his beard is still walnut. He walks to the other side of the bed and looks down at the girl, who is so exhausted that she falls asleep between the pains. Through the window, Haskell and Olympia can see the father standing beside the Pope-Hartford, clearly more interested in the motorcar than in the progress of his daughter.
“No mother present?” Haskell asks.
Olympia shakes her head.
Haskell narrows his eyes. “Tell me this is not what I think it is.”
“I do not know. I have had the same thought. I pray not. The girl refuses to say who the father is, but that could be for any number of reasons.”
In the eight years they have been working together, she and Haskell have attended incestuous births before. Once they birthed a woman who made no attempt to hide her obvious physical affection for her brother, a situation that rattled Haskell no end.
“What is the father’s name?”
“Colton.”
She bends to the girl. “Lydia, this is Dr. Haskell,” she says as the girl is awakened by another pain.
In answer, the girl grits her teeth and makes again the short rhythmic grunts.
Haskell lifts her birthing skirt and examines her.
“I am not sure about the pelvis,” he says. “But it is definitely near time. How did you get here?”
“Josiah.”
“The Reverend Milton called you?”
“Yes, I tried to reach you at the clinic. Josiah said he would stop by to see if he could find you. Apparently the father only went to the minister after his daughter had been in labor more than ten hours. I think they thought they could manage the birth themselves.”
Haskell shakes his head. In synchronous movements — which are the same, yet never exactly the same — Haskell slides the girl down along the bed, lifts her knees, and gently secures her ankles to the bedposts while Olympia props her up into a half-sitting position with pillows and sacking behind her. As she does this, she speaks constantly to the girl so that she will not be unduly afraid. Earlier, during a respite from the contractions, Olympia explained to Lydia the procedures that would happen, having surmised, rightly, that the girl had no idea whatsoever about the birth to come. Even so, the child looks frightened half out of her mind, simply from the pain if nothing else.
“She can bear down now,” Haskell says.
“Lydia,” Olympia instructs. “Strain as if at stool.”
The girl strains. She grunts and pants for breath. And then, on Olympia’s instructions, she repeats the process. And then again. And then again.
“The head is presenting,” Haskell says after a time. “I shall not need the forceps after all. Lydia, bear down hard now. Push with all your might.”
The girl screams as if she were being torn apart. Outside by the car, the father freezes. The head is born, and Haskell passes his finger around the infant’s neck to find out whether the navel-string is wound around it. “Lydia, bear down hard now,” Haskell commands, this time with some urgency in his voice. He pulls on the cord, loosens it, and slips it over the baby’s head.
“Now, massage the uterus,” Haskell says to Olympia.
Olympia places her hand upon the lower portion of the girl’s abdomen and presses upon the uterus. The infant, slippery and purple, emerges into the world. Haskell grasps the child firmly with both hands and immediately attends to it, suctioning the mucus from the mouth. Olympia hears the infant, a boy, make his first astonished cry. On the bed, the girl weeps, a particular kind of weeping Olympia has seen often but never witnessed outside the childbed, a combination of relief from pain and joy and exhaustion and something else — fear about the days and nights to come. In the doorway, the father is white-faced.
While Haskell attends to the child, Olympia massages the girl’s uterus into a hard ball to prevent flooding and tries to provoke a contraction forceful enough to expel the placenta. After Haskell has cut the cord, Olympia gently pulls on it, and the afterbirth comes away. “Lydia, stop,” Olympia says, twisting the afterbirth round and round upon itself and withdrawing it. She sets it aside to be examined later. She stands.
“Let me,” she says, lifting the infant out of Haskell’s arms. She receives the child into the flannel, and it seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.
• • •
Olympia tucks the robe around her legs and ties the scarf over her hat and under her chin. The ride is jarring from the ruts as they enter the village and turn onto the main road out of town.
“I shall go back tomorrow,” Olympia says.
“The girl has no one?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“I did not like the look of the father.”
“Nor I. I shall have to call Reverend Milton about the family. John, I think she may need to be taken in.”
“Is there room?”
“Yes, just. Eunice will be going to Portsmouth tomorrow.”
“As tutor to the Johnsons?”
“Yes.”
“And the infant?”
“My dear, the ‘infant’ is a y
ear and a half.”
“Is she? Has it been that long since Eunice came?”
They enter the city limits of Ely Falls. Since the mills have begun to close, the city is slightly less bustling than it used to be. If Ely Falls goes the way of Lowell and Manchester, it will not be long before they will pass empty boardinghouses and collapsed mill buildings. They head east onto the Ely road.
“How was the clinic?” Olympia asks.
“Much the same. Though I did see a dreadful case of accidental poisoning by oxalic acid. The woman had mistaken it for Epsom salts and given it to her husband. The man died within twenty minutes of reaching the clinic. It was terrifying to watch his struggle, Olympia. The pain in his esophagus and stomach must have been beyond imagining. I tried magnesia and chalk, but he was too far gone for that.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?” Olympia asks.
Haskell turns briefly in his wife’s direction. “My dear, you do have a devious mind,” he says, reaching for her leg. “Well, the police are bound to investigate any accidental death. Also, a man came by trying to sell me an X-ray machine.”
“And will you buy it?”
“Yes, I think I might. I am rather convinced by the research.”
He massages her thigh through her skirt. “And Tucker came round today,” he adds.
“Did he?” Olympia asks.
“He needed to discuss some matters having to do with fundraising. He said he was getting married.”
“To whom?”
“A woman named Alys Keep.”
“The poetess?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“How extraordinary.”
