Then grad school finally started. The University of Rhode Island wasn’t a particularly high-powered place, and everyone there seemed to grasp the fact that, as universities go, this was very minor-league . . . and not the Harvard Graduate School of Education, just an hour up the road. Still, the teacher’s course covered all the basics, two of the professors were enthusiastic, and within six weeks of starting the course, the placement office found me a weekend job in a remedial school in town, which brought in $50 a week—and filled the time.
And time passed quickly. Suddenly, it was November, and Nixon won every state in the union except Massachusetts. (The fact that McGovern lost Vermont was something of a personal blow to Dad, who’d made his campaign in that state something of his own personal crusade.) Around the same time, Mom decided to pay me a visit, during which I finally gave her the official news that I was pregnant. Her reply was predictable.
“Hell, I knew that months ago. Any reason why you waited so long to tell me?”
“Because I knew you’d give me a hard time about having a baby so soon.”
Mom smiled a dangerous smile. And said, “Well, Hannah, at this point you are a very big girl—and if you want to limit your life at such a young age, why should I stop you? In any case, you never listen to a word I say.”
The day after Mom headed back to Vermont, Dan and I went out to dinner at a little Italian place near our apartment. After we ordered, he asked, “How’d you like to leave Providence at the end of June?”
“I’d like that very much,” I said. “But aren’t we stuck here for your residency next year?”
“Something interesting just came down the pike today,” he said, then explained how the chief resident in pediatrics at the hospital—a certain Dr. Potholm, who had become something of a mentor to Dan, since he was now considering becoming a pediatrician—had told him of a job opening in Maine.
“Potholm has a friend at Maine Medical—that’s the big hospital in Portland—who called him the other day, asking if he knew of any bright young internist who wanted to spend a year as a GP in a place called Pelham . . .”
“Never heard of it.”
“Nor had I. Looked it up on a map this afternoon. It’s a small town of around three thousand, around an hour due west of Portland, located in lake country, somewhere near Bridgton . . .”
“Which I’ve also never heard of.”
“Anyway, it seems their GP—a guy named Bland—has decided to do a year overseas with the Peace Corps, so it’s a twelve-month gig.”
“After which we’d return to Providence?”
He looked at me with amusement.
“Which is your idea of hell?” he asked.
“Put it this way: it’s a big country.”
He laughed and said, “Tell you what. Why don’t we drive up to Pelham this weekend, check the place out, and then decide what our next move will be.”
Which is what we did—and around half an hour after we arrived in Pelham, I found myself thinking: this is promising. Dan had similar thoughts—and three days after we got back home, he phoned the officer from the Maine Regional Health Authority who’d interviewed him, and told him that, if they were interested in him, he was certainly interested in spending twelve months as the doctor for Pelham, Maine.
Within a week, they called back to tell him he had the job. A few days later, I made the call I was dreading to my mother. When I told her the news, she said, “I always knew you’d end up in a really small town. It’s just your style.”
FIVE
MY SON, JEFFREY John Buchan, was born on April 8, 1973. It was, according to the obstetrician, a “straightforward delivery”—even though fourteen hours of labor, ameliorated by gas during the final big push, didn’t strike me as exactly straightforward. But I didn’t care. Jeffrey was beautiful—and when the nurse first handed him to me and he snuggled his head against mine, I was smitten. Then, after Dan pulled out his Instamatic and took the first snapshots of mother and child, the nurse relieved me of my son, telling me I needed to rest. And I collapsed into the sleep I so craved.
That was the last decent sleep I had for the next three months. Name any and every postnatal complaint a baby can suffer—colic, cradle cap, lactose intolerance—Jeffrey experienced them all. Dan was sympathetic . . . but only up to a point. My dad was also sympathetic—reminding me, on the phone, that I too had had colic during the first eight weeks of my life. Then he changed the subject to the one thing he wanted to discuss constantly: the emerging Watergate scandal. Dad’s past appearance on the Nixon Enemies List had just led to a whole new round of press interviews and speaking engagements for him, but he did find time to drop down to Providence for a day with Mom to meet their first grandchild. Afterward Mom sent us a beautiful old-fashioned baby carriage, and she did call me every other day to find out how I was doing, though anytime I mentioned just how damn tired I was and wondered out loud whether I’d ever see the end of Jeffrey’s assorted ailments, she wasn’t exactly wildly sympathetic.
“Welcome to motherhood—which, in my experience, is one long kvetch. But the good news is that after you’ve spent twenty-one years raising Jeffrey, he’ll simply resent you.”
When I recounted this statement to Margy, she said:
“Hey, just accept the fact that your mom is probably a manic-depressive and you’ll stop getting so damn distressed about everything she says to you.”
Margy was standing in my living room with a tumbler full of Smirnoff in one hand. She’d come up to Providence a couple of weeks after the baby was born. I was just home with Jeffrey, suffering broken nights.
“Well, he’s really cute . . .” Margy said, trying to sound convincing.
“For someone who screams all the time.”
“Well, you know me. It’s the screamers who always win me over. Did the doctors give you any idea how long this might go on?”
“Until he goes to college.”
During the two days that Margy was up visiting me, Dan didn’t make an appearance, though he did call to explain that all hell was breaking loose at the hospital. There had been a teenage pileup on the interstate, he had just dealt with a severely dehydrated nine-month-old girl whose Christian Scientist parents had spent the last seven days treating her chronic diarrhea with prayer, and then there was the big-deal city counselor who had a coronary on the golf course and . . .
“Right, I’ve got the picture,” I said.
“Don’t be angry, sweetie.”
“I’m not angry . . . I’m just weary. And I hate when you call me sweetie.”
“How’s Margy getting on?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Desperate to have a child.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Oh . . . that’s a joke, right?”
“Yes, Dan, it’s a joke. How much sleep did you get last night?”
“Maybe three hours.”
“Isn’t that dangerous . . . for your patients, that is?”
“Haven’t killed anyone yet. Listen, I will try to get home tomorrow . . .”
“Margy will be gone by then.”
“Sorry.”
When I put down the phone, Margy (who was sitting opposite me in the kitchen during this entire conversation) fired up another cigarette and said, “Well, that sounded warm and cuddly.”
I just shrugged and filled the percolator with more coffee.
“Things a little difficult between you guys right now?” she asked.
“No, everything’s real warm and cuddly . . .”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“And I didn’t mean to sound like a bitch. Sorry . . .”
“Jeffrey’s asleep right now, so why don’t you try to catch a nap . . .”
“But if he wakes up?”
“You got some bottles of formula in the icebox?”
I nodded.
“Then I’ll heat one up on the stove.”
“Make sure it’s not too hot, not
too cold . . .”
“Roger Wilco, Goldilocks.”
“And if he’s colicky, the best thing is to rub his back until . . .”
“I know—the kid burps. Now get into that bed . . .”
I surrendered to sleep the moment I pulled the blankets over me. The next thing I knew, Margy was shaking me. I glanced at the clock. I had been asleep less than thirty minutes, and was so out of it I couldn’t comprehend her first few sentences. But I snapped awake when she said, “He just vomited down my back.”
I was up in seconds. Sure enough, Jeffrey was hysterical. Margy, in her panic, had put him back in his crib, still covered in puke. He had somehow managed to end up on his belly and was understandably terrified and panicked. I picked him up. I put him across my shoulder and started stroking his head. Almost instantly he threw up all over me, then began to wail like someone who had decided that life was completely hopeless. At this moment in time, it certainly seemed that way to me too.
Half an hour later, with Jeffrey back napping in his crib, Margy and I sat at the kitchen table, smoking.
“If I ever start getting broody,” she said, “remind me about this morning.”
“Will do,” I said. “And if I’m ever deranged enough to do this again . . .”
“I’ll vomit on you, okay?”
When Margy left for Manhattan early the next morning, she looked beyond tired—having walked the floors with me and Jeffrey all that night.
“Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the train,” she said. “And, unlike you, I will actually be able to crash out for eight hours tonight. Any chance you could hire in a nurse for a couple of nights so you can get some decent sleep?”
“Can’t afford it. But I am going to have to find some sort of child care to look after him while I’m packing us up for the move to Maine.”
“Should be nice, living in a small town. Real . . . uh . . . quaint.”
I laughed. “You are the worst liar I’ve ever met.”
“Hey, it’s got to be better than Providence.”
A couple of weeks later, we closed up our apartment and headed north—our entire worldly possessions packed into a U-Haul van that Dan drove. I followed in the Volvo, with Jeffrey in the backseat. Miracle of miracles, he slept for most of the six-hour journey—no mean feat, considering New England was in the middle of a heat wave and our venerable Volvo wasn’t exactly air-conditioned.
But as soon as we reached our new home in Maine, Jeffrey started to wail again. So did I. In the week or so since Dr. Bland had headed off, a pipe had burst in the kitchen, flooding the entire downstairs of the house. We walked in to discover water everywhere. I blinked with shock. Jeffrey, currently across my shoulder, must have sensed my distress, as he flipped into howling mode. Dan waded into the kitchen, let out a loud “Oh shit,” and returned with his pants drenched. I immediately headed for the front door, sat down on the front steps, and tried to calm myself and Jeffrey down.
Dan came out, looking deeply displeased.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
He nodded and glanced at his watch. It was nearly six. Darkness would arrive within the hour.
“First things first: let’s find us somewhere to spend the night.”
The choice of accommodations in Pelham, Maine, wasn’t exactly enormous. There was just one option—a small motel on the edge of town. It was a real mom-and-pop place: little cabinlike units, with the sort of cheap wood-paneled walls that I’d seen in dozens of rec rooms, and a flowery carpet with assorted cigarette burns and coffee stains.
“Don’t worry,” Dan said. “I’ll get us out of here by tomorrow.”
Actually, it took us two weeks to finally exit that joyless motel. This was not due to Dan’s lack of action. On the contrary, he was on the phone five minutes after we checked in, talking with plumbers, the resident nurse, and Pelham’s only cop, who, as it turned out, knew Dr. Bland’s sister. Not only that, he even had her phone number in Lewiston, and he promised to give her a call straightaway.
“How did he have her number?” I asked.
“His brother went out with her in high school—and Farrell’s wife happens to be her oldest friend.”
“This is a small town,” I said.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. I answered it and found myself speaking to Delores Bland. Without asking me my name, she said, “You the new doc’s wife?” and then launched into a monologue, telling me that Joe Farrell had just called her, and she was furious on our behalf because that pipe had leaked last winter and she had told her brother to get it repaired, but he was so cheap that he tried to repair it himself, and now he was in Africa, and she was going to have to get the insurers on the phone tomorrow, and the plumber had just called and he was en route to the house right now, and wasn’t the motel horrible, but she would only expect that from the guy who managed it—Chad Clark—who really was a creepy momma’s boy who never brushed his teeth when she knew him in high school, and maybe we could take the little apartment over the doctor’s office, which is where Nurse London lived until she got pregnant by Tony Bass, who ran the local service station and had to get married, and jeez, wasn’t that a mistake and a half, and she wanted to drive right over to Pelham tonight, but she was a tenth-grade homeroom teacher at Franklin Pierce High School in Auburn, and tonight the school was presenting the musical Li’l Abner, which she simply had to attend, but she would be on the phone first thing tomorrow to Nurse London-now-Bass, and if we wanted somewhere to eat tonight, we’d best drive over to Bridgton, which was only fifteen minutes by Route 117, and when we got to Bridgton there was this “real nice” restaurant called Goodwin’s which had great hamburgers and the best milkshakes in Maine called Awful Awfuls ’cause they were Awful Big and Awful Good, but be sure to ask for one with extra malt in it, ’cause that only cost a nickel extra and . . .
Halfway through this monologue I had to pull the phone away from my head. But I did thank Delores for her help and we did take her advice and drove over to Bridgton. It wasn’t hard to find Goodwin’s, as it was the only restaurant in town. I couldn’t face up to a triple-patty hamburger or a forty-eight-ounce Awful Awful. However, it was a long time until breakfast, so I forced down a grilled cheese sandwich and tried to interest Jeff in a few spoonfuls of ice cream. But he was building up to one of his extended wails—which, as I well knew, always started with a series of whines before quickly transforming into a lamentation that could go on for hours. Sure enough, ten minutes after we sat down, Jeff went ballistic.
“Great,” Dan said under his breath.
“At least you won’t be up all night with him,” I said, hating the strident tone that had entered my voice.
“We’ll both be up with him tonight,” he said.
“Well, that’ll be a change,” I snapped back.
“I’ve only been putting in sixteen-hour days . . .”
“And I’ve only been putting in twenty-two-hour days . . .”
We said nothing on the drive back to Pelham. We said nothing when we got back to the motel. I put Jeffrey into the bed next to me. Dan sat in one of the armchairs and stared at the old black-and-white television, which looked like it dated back to the Eisenhower years. Our son must have sensed the tension between us, because he refused to settle down. I walked him around every corner of the room at least a dozen times. I let him suck my breasts dry. Dan dozed in the armchair. I finally got back into bed with Jeff, pleading with him to cut us some slack and give us the most nominal of breaks by simply conking out for a couple of hours. He refused to cooperate—until around five-thirty that morning, when he finally closed his eyes and nodded off. Within moments, I passed out as well—waking with a start when he started his prewail rumble again. I was still fully clothed—my body clammy and stiff with tiredness. I glanced at my watch: 7:45 a.m. We’d been asleep for just over two hours. Dan was not in the room, but there was a note beside me on the bed: Gone out. Meet me at Miss Pelham’s for breakfast.
Miss Pel
ham’s was the one restaurant in town—more of a diner, with a couple of booths and a lunch counter. Dan was seated in one of the booths, a pad of paper in front of him. As I sat down, I noticed that he was finishing a to-do list. He got up and relieved me of Jeffrey, cradling him on his lap.
“You get some sleep?” he asked.
“Yeah. And you?”
“I’ve crashed in better armchairs.”
The waitress came by. She was a short, stubby woman in her fifties, a pencil protruding from her bun of blond-gray hair, a coffeepot in her left hand.
“Morning, hon. Bet you could use some of this after the little surprise you got yesterday. And can I heat up a bottle for junior there? It’s Jeffrey, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, he’s a total cutie,” she said, pouring me a mug of coffee. “Got the bottle, hon?”
I dug it out of my shoulder bag.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Happy to oblige. Name’s Chrissy, by the way. And you’re Hannah, right?”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, trying to smile through my tiredness. As soon as she headed off with the bottle, I turned to Dan and said, “She seems friendly.”
Chrissy returned with the bottle.
“There you go, Doc,” she said, handing Dan the bottle. “Nice to see a fella doing some mommy work for a change. You’re a lucky woman there, Hannah. And hey, since I guess you’re going to have to move into the apartment above the doctor’s office, you’re going to really need it painted—like fast. ’Cause Nurse Bass kind of kept it poorly. Then again, between ourselves, Betty Bass is a great nurse, but real sloppy when it comes to, uh, everything else. But I guess you probably heard all about that by now.”
“Not really,” I said, trying to dodge local controversy.
“Well, you will. Anyway, Billy’s the local decorator around here—and I was speaking to him last night after I heard about the flood at Doc Bland’s house. And since we figured you’d be coming here for breakfast this morning, he wanted you to know that he could start work this afternoon . . . and he’ll meet you at the apartment at nine this morning. Which means you’ve got time to try our Miss Pelham’s Special: three eggs sunny-side up, corned beef hash, four sausages, hash browns, and if you’re real hungry, we can add a pancake or two.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 119
