by Rose Doyle
'Calm her down.' The doctor, at the other end of the bed, was terse. 'Tell her to bear down and push.'
His head went between her legs and I looked away, taking deep breaths, trying to call up something, in all that I'd read in recent weeks, about childbirth. Little of what I remembered bore any relation to what was happening to the woman on the bed.
'Pretend I'm Ma Brophy,' I said as I wiped her forehead and held her hand, fast, 'bear down the way she told you with the others. You can do it. You did it for them. Four times, you said.'
'I'm trying, I'm trying . . .' She relaxed a little as the pain passed. I went on mopping her brow. 'Push when the pain comes again,' I said.
'I will, I will.' Fat tears rolled down her face. She caught them with her tongue when they went into her mouth. 'I knew all along things weren't right. I've been afraid all the time for this baby.' She gave a loud wail. 'It's going to die, I'm going to die . .. my children will be without a mother . . .' She threw her head from side to side. 'Oh, Mary Mother of God let my baby live . . .'
'Keep trying to calm her down,' the doctor said, washing his hands, 'the head's engaged. The next lot of contractions will do it.' His bald pate shone. He looked tired, and very worried.
'Tell me your name,' I said to the woman.
'I'm May O'Toole.' She'd grown pale and was trembling all over. 'I was sick from the first day and I've been feeling strange all of the time. All the time sick . . .' Heavy, silent tears continued to make channels down her face. 'I know what I have to do.' She looked at me. The trembling stopped. 'I know I have to bring this baby into the world but the only way I know to do it is the way Ma Brophy told me.'
'Tell me what to do,' I said.
'You must hold me down, when the pains come you must…’ She took a quick, gasping breath.' Oh, Mother of God they're starting again. Hold on to me, hard, keep telling me when to push.’
I looked at the doctor and he nodded.
'Now,' I said, 'push now, May, hard, I'm holding you. Now . . . and again.'
May O'Toole pushed. She half sat and I held her, talking to her. Her pain was terrible. She was a woman used to pain and hard times and yet she could hardly bear this agony. She was all but fainting when I heard the doctor's muttering.
'Too fast . . . this is too fast . . .'
He was listening with a stethoscope on May's bloated belly and I wished, for the first and only time in my life, that I hadn't read so much. I wouldn't have known otherwise that he'd found the baby's heartbeat and that it was beating too quickly.
May O'Toole lay against me limp and whimpering, exhausted by pain, her face clammy and cold.
'We've got to get her baby out,' Dr Connolly was brusque, 'let go of her and bring me the forceps. Quickly.'
As I handed him the forceps I saw the baby's head myself. It filled me with awe for the job that women have to do, for the great service they give the world.
It also decided me never to have a baby myself.
Dr Connolly applied the forceps and I went back to holding May O'Toole. Her contractions had eased but she was trying feebly to push nevertheless, and she was praying. The doctor, so as to get leverage, put his foot on the end of the bed and pulled with both hands, his face purple with effort.
May O'Toole clung to me. The whole thing seemed to me so brutish that there must be another way. There was no science to it. It was barbaric.
The baby came into the world quite gently in the end. One minute Dr Connolly was like a lunatic taking a cork out of a bottle, the next he was holding May O'Toole's blood-covered, newborn baby boy, delivering a slap to his buttocks.
The baby didn't cry. The doctor clamped and cut the umbilical cord and it fell away, limp.
'The airways will have to be cleared.' He laid the baby on the table and picked up a rubber bulb with a suction end. 'I'd be obliged, my dear,' he said this to me gently, 'if you would do this for the little fellow. I'll guide you. Hurry up now, hurry, hurry . . .'
I did everything he said, using the apparatus to suck mucus and fluids from the baby's mouth, listening all the while for the tiny chest to draw in, hoping the legs would kick, that somehow life would begin.
Nothing happened.
Dr Connolly took the baby and I stood again beside a silent May O'Toole while he splashed cold water on its back. But there was no life in the small body and there never would be. The silent room held all the answer we needed.
'Give me my baby.' May O'Toole held out her arms.
'There's no point, May.' Dr Connolly was gentle. 'He's gone. You know that.'
May O'Toole didn't ask again. She lay down and was very still and silent while he went behind the screen with the body. She looked up when he reappeared with it wrapped in a cotton sheet. 'His father will make his coffin today,' she said, 'he'll come to take him away in it when it's ready.' She rubbed a hand over her eyes. 'Someone'll have to go and tell him.' She made a small, grunting sound. 'I don't feel so good.'
Dr Connolly positioned the screen around her bed. 'The boy will get your husband,' he said gently, 'you'll be at home in your own bed in a few hours and the handywoman'll look after you there.'
I'd cleaned the table of the baby's blood and was looking at the sad shape his body made in his cotton shroud when Dr Connolly reappeared from behind the screen.
'You did well,' his eyes were bloodshot, 'you were a good help to Mrs O'Toole. It wasn't an easy one.' He put the stethoscope on the table and began to wash his hands. 'Thank you for cleaning up here too. Do you feel able to stay another few hours? I need the help.' He gave me a smile that was wryly conspiratorial. 'Bridget means well but her idea of nursing is to boil water and scold patients.'
'I could work here for longer than that,' I said. 'If you were agreeable I could come several days a week.'
He was tired, but not that tired. He took me in from head to
toe.
'What training have you done?' he asked.
'I'm self-taught and self . . . trained.'
'I'll be more explicit: what experience have you?'
I was silent for a minute; there was no good lying to this man.
'I've tended sick friends,' I said, 'and at my school in France one of the nuns, who had worked as a nurse in the Crimea, taught some of us what she knew. Also, I've been reading Mrs Fenwick's Nursing Record and . . .' I paused, debating what else to tell him, whether I should mention everything else I'd read as well as tell him I knew Daniel Casey and wanted to be a doctor.
I decided against confusing things and said, simply, 'I want to nurse. I'll do whatever you ask of me.' There was a knock on the door and a voice called the doctor's name. 'I'll work hard,' I added.
'You might be useful,' Dr Connolly said, 'you just might do us. Although, if I'm to be honest, you don't look the part.' He began to roll down his shirtsleeves. 'What is your name?'
'Alicia Buckley.'
There was another knock on the door. This time it opened and the woman Bridget came in. Behind her in the waiting room I saw Sarah, pacing and white-faced with my bonnet in her hands.
'She delivered it then.' Bridget, eyeing the screen, was grim. 'Stillborn?'
Dr Connolly nodded. 'Sadly,' he sighed. 'Ask the boy to run for her husband, will you Bridget? He's just to bring him to the dispensary, not tell him anything. I'll do the talking when he gets here.'
Bridget sniffed. She was dressed in darkest grey with a crucifix on the end of a chain round her neck. If my guess was right she belonged to one of the groups of unmarried, older women who gave time to good works. Her expression reminded me of Mary Connor's.
'If he's like others of his kind,' she said, 'the husband's more than likely in the pub.'
'Tell the boy to get him, Bridget, if you would, and then make tea for Mrs O'Toole.' The doctor lifted his coat from a chair and buttoned himself into it. 'This young woman here has agreed to work with us a while. She's got knowledge and some small experience, or at least has gained some in the past hour.'
He ignored a rash of disapproving sniffs from Bridget and turned to me. 'Bring in the next patient,' he said.
When I hesitated, wanting to ask him if this meant we had an arrangement for me to work in the dispensary, he added a curt, 'Please.'
I brought a protesting Sarah back with me.
'I wanted to see Dr Casey,' she looked around as if expecting Daniel Casey to fall from the ceiling.
'Then I hope you're prepared to wait a long time,' said Dr Connolly. 'He's on a sick call. He's younger, fitter and more able than I am to climb tenement stairs. Wait if you want . . .' He waved her away.
'Sit down, Sarah,' I pulled forward a chair and she sat.
While Bridget gave tea to May O'Toole I told Dr Connolly, quietly as I could, what Sarah had done.
He drew up a chair and sat opposite her. 'What you did was both foolish and dangerous. You could have poisoned yourself as well as the foetus. I suppose you knew you might die?'
'Yes.' Sarah's eyes were bright with tears. She sat on her hands to stop their trembling.
'I'm forty years practising medicine and I'll never understand why young women risk all. Better to live and have hope, my dear,' he shook his head, 'better to live and have hope.'
'I am alive,' Sarah pointed out. She said nothing about her baby.
'I suppose the father's left you? No, don't answer.' The doctor held up his hand. 'Just so long as you're aware you could have killed yourself. From the look of you it's too early in your pregnancy for it to have done harm to the baby. Don't try anything like it again, though. You might not be so lucky the next time. If you do attempt it again don't come back here to me.'
Muttering and sighing he signed to Sarah to show him her hands. She took them from under her skirts and he held them in his own, examining them closely.
'Now your toes,' he said.
As Sarah, without a word, bent to untie her bootlaces he asked her what day it was, and what time of year.
'It's a Wednesday and it's the end of November and the year is eighteen sixty-seven. Do you think I'm mad, is that it?' Sarah pulled off her boots and glared at him, ignoring tears as they began to fall.
'My dear young woman,' the doctor said, sounding infinitely weary, 'because you've imbibed a lethal poison I am obliged to check your mental stability, as well as your physical well-being. Miss Buckley, bring us another chair, if you please.'
When I did this he put Sarah's feet resting on it and carefully examined her toes. 'I'm doing this,' he told her, 'to check whether or not the ergot might have caused a closure of the blood vessels.' He handed her her boots. 'You appear in good health. Am I to understand, since you're here, that you intend having this child?'
I handed Sarah a piece of damp lint and she wiped her face.
'I'm very glad the ergot didn't do any harm. I'm sorry I did what I did . . .' She bent to lace her boots. 'Will my baby be all right?'
'Probably. But I'll need to examine you.'
Because May O'Toole was using the bed Sarah stood while Dr Connolly felt her abdomen and listened to her heart. She held my hand all the while tightening her grip when he asked her when she'd stopped menstruating, if her breasts were swollen yet. He sat at last with a pad of paper.
'You're a healthy young woman and, providing you look after yourself, your baby will be fine. Get this tonic at the dispensary. I take it you're not married?'
Sarah, shocked by the abruptness of the question, could only shake her head, no.
'Come back in a month's time,' the doctor said, 'we’ll find you a place to go to when your time comes.'
'I'll be married by then,' said Sarah.
He patted her on the hand. 'I hope so.' He turned to me. 'There's a man outside with a cut to his head. Bring him in to me, Miss Buckley.' He'd begun to mutter again as he went behind the screen to May O'Toole.
'How is it you always get what you want?' Sarah asked as she came with me to the man with the cut head. 'Dr Casey won't be pleased when he sees you working here.'
'I don't always get what I want and Daniel Casey doesn't own this dispensary . . .' I tapped the man with the cut head on the shoulder. He shook himself awake. 'Go on in to the doctor,' I said.
'I must go,' said Sarah, 'I'll be missed and there'll be questions asked. I hope my secret's safe with that doctor.'
'Doctors are bound by an oath . . .'
'And fish fly,' Sarah snorted.
The roars of the man with the cut could be heard, I'm sure, in the street. The cut was from a bottle. He needed stitches and the roaring began when I shaved the hair from the edge of the cut. It got even louder when Dr Connolly put in the stitches.
He made ten times the fuss May O'Toole, trying to rest behind the screen, had made. The small girl with the stone cut came next. I'd washed it with iodine and Dr Connolly was bandaging it when Daniel Casey arrived in.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Allie
My parents would have none of it.
'I'll burn the place down,’ my father roared, ‘I’ll not have a daughter of mine catching typhus or cholera or others of the unholy diseases spread by the poor about this town . . .’
'Disease doesn't confine itself to the poor,' I said, 'there's typhoid on Clyde Road and Elgin Road.'
'Brought there by the poor.' My mother played gently with the cat's ears. He sat on her lap with his eyes half closed, as wide awake as my mother, for all her languid air.
'The result of bad drains,' I said, 'the Medical Officer of Health and Dublin Castle have agreed.'
'I should never have allowed those medical books into the house.'
My father stomped from armchair to cabinet to secretary, bringing his fist down on the surface of each. We were in the drawing room, the curtains tightly closed and the coal fire fiercely burning. If my father felt frustrated then it was nothing to how smothered I felt myself.
'Disease has to be treated,' I said, 'and people made well. It's not the dispensaries that spread disease. It's expecting people to live like animals in the sort of squalid tenements to be found not a half-mile from here.' I paused. 'Have you been out and about in Ringsend and Irishtown?'
My father came to a halt, alarm all over his face. 'Have you been to those places too?'
'I don't have to,' I could barely keep my patience. 'The world knows how overcrowded the tenements are. How insanitary, badly ventilated, lacking in drainage. The Irish Times has written that even natives on the west coast of Africa are better housed than the residents of Ringsend, Irishtown and Ballsbridge, Dada. Why, in the cottages right behind us . . .'
'Disease, like the poor, will always be with us,' my mother yawned dismissively.
'It certainly will so long as it is not dealt with.'
'By others. Not by a daughter of mine.' My father stood with his backside to the fire. I worried that he would go up in flames but he didn't seem to feel the heat. 'I forbid you to go back to that dispensary.'
My mother yawned again and rested her hands in the cat's long fur. I decided on cunning.
'It's thanks to both of you that I've developed my interest in medicine.' I looked earnestly from one to the other of them. My mother ignored me, my father stared. 'It was you who brought Dr McDermott into my life and talking with him made me see what must be done.' His indifference had certainly goaded me. 'Think how useful this experience would be to me as the wife of a doctor, were that to happen.'
'It's not a wife's function to involve herself in her husband's life. And it's a wife Dr McDermott wants, not a work mate.' My father was not taken in.
'I agree.' My mother nuzzled Alfred as she spoke.
I wondered if my mother's lethargy was caused by the heat from the fire or by laudanum, or opium of some kind. It didn't seem natural.
'It could be,' I said, 'that I could bring myself to become the first if I was able, in some small way, to become the second.'
I'll never know where this line of argument, dishonest but resourceful, might have got me without the unwitting help of
'Is the fire all right for you, ma'am? Does it need slacking up?' She stood in the shadows, her cap pulled more tightly than ever across her skull, her hands neatly crossed. My father frowned, my mother and the cat looked lazily pleased.
'The fire will do,' my mother said, 'but you might pour me a small glass of Madeira port. None for my daughter. She seems overly excited as it is.'
'I'll have a whiskey,' said my father and I swore inwardly. The alcohol would stir him up even more.
Mary Connor busied herself at the cabinet.
'I've invited Dr McDermott to dine with us on Friday,' my mother said.
'You might tell me of these dinners in advance, Harriet.' My father frowned. 'I won't be here.'
'All to the better,' my mother said, and shrugged, 'Maurice is sometimes inhibited by your company. It's our daughter he wants to see. In the meantime, Alicia, you are forbidden to go to that dispensary.'
She took the port from Mary Connor. My father finished the whiskey she gave him in one gulp. The housekeeper cleared her throat.
'It's not my place to interfere, ma'am,' she said, 'but since you're talking of dispensaries I heard only today that the one beyond in Ringsend is overrun with rats.'
My mother gave a small squeal and shiver of revulsion. But I knew Mary Connor had heard no such thing.
'You heard wrong,' I said, 'the dispensaries are very strictly policed by the sanitary inspectors.'
'You can't change the insanitary habits of the poor,' said the housekeeper.
'The dispensaries are not run by the poor,' I said, 'they're run for the poor.'
'But it's the poor who populate them and who bring their
habits in with them.' Mary Connor raised her voice. 'A dispensary is no place for a young woman from a good family.'
She'd overstepped her role. If my father had liked her he'd have overlooked this. He detested her.
