The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  All of Heather, Naomi thought, her jaw setting in disbelief. Everything that was private to Heather, revealed in pounds and centimeters, cycles and durations. The girl herself covered her face in her hands, as Naomi herself would have done. As any woman, she imagined, would have done, had she been stripped this way, not to mention spread, not to mention so intimately inspected. The doctor, flatly, disclosed the age at which Heather Pratt first menstruated, the perfect regulariy of her twenty-eight-day cycle, the length and volume of her menstruation, her mid-cycle cramping indicative of ovulation. He revealed to one and all the width of her pelvis. He discussed in detail the shape and dimensions of Heather’s uterus, its tip to the rear, its fibroid tumor the size of a silver dollar at its anterior end. He disclosed that her uterus, when he had performed a pelvic examination days after Heather’s arrest, was 7.7 centimeters long, only slightly longer than the size of a normal uterus in a non-pregnant woman, which was 7.5 centimeters, but this was not surprising, given that the examination had taken place over three weeks postpartum.

  Could she have had twins, was what Charter wanted to know.

  Oh, certainly, the doctor said. No question.

  Then they all had a lesson about twins.

  Identical—or monozygotic—twins, the doctor lectured, were formed by the splitting of a fertilized egg. That was not the case here, clearly, as the two baby girls were not identical. Fraternal—or dizygotic—twins, on the other hand, were formed when two separate eggs were produced by the ovary, then fertilized by two different sperm, creating full siblings who were not genetically indistinguishable. A woman’s natural production of multiple eggs—that is, production unassisted by fertility drugs—was due to higher levels of follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone than are found in mothers who produce single babies. There may also be a genetic component determining a tendency in this direction. In other words, fraternal twins tend to run in families. The rate of dizygotic twins in North America was 7 to 11 per 1,000 births.

  “I see,” Charter said. He got up from his seat. Naomi tensed, sensing the absurdities to come. “Would you tell us, please, about the process known as superfecundation, Doctor?”

  The man nodded, well rehearsed.

  “Superfecundation, simply put, is the fertilization of two eggs by two fathers, producing dizygotic twins who are, in fact, only half siblings. This occurs when a woman has sexual intercourse with two men at short intervals within the same ovulatory period. One egg is fertilized by the first man, and a short time later, a second egg is fertilized by the second. They both implant in the uterus and grow normally.”

  “You mentioned a ‘short interval’ between these sexual contacts. How short?”

  The doctor appeared to consider. “There has not been an overabundance of research in this field, so I can’t answer the question with any certainty.”

  “Can you make an estimate, based on your expertise in this field?”

  “I would say up to forty-eight hours. That is my estimate.”

  “Forty-eight hours!” Charter said, loudly surprised. “So if a woman had sex with one man and then with another two days later, she might plausibly produce twins by superfecundation?”

  “If she had produced two eggs prior to the first contact, yes.”

  “She wouldn’t have to, for example, jump out of one bed and run immediately to the other?” This attempt at levity, Naomi was sorry to see, won a smile from one of the men on the jury.

  “No. Two days should be within a reasonable limit for potential superfecundation.”

  Each time he spoke the word it sounded more legitimate, it rolled more smoothly off his tongue, as if “superfecundation” were a commonplace term, often used, as familiar in the waiting room as in the laboratory. He made the phenomenon sound rather commonplace and unremarkable, so that when he was finished, one could not help but wonder why superfecundation did not, in fact, happen all the time. But perhaps that was Judith’s job.

  She got right down to this, standing at her table and giving him a very doubtful look.

  “Could you tell us, Doctor, why—if superfecundation is so commonplace—it doesn’t happen all the time?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t, really. I don’t know the answer.”

  “Until this case was brought to your attention, had you ever, personally, cared for a patient who was, to the best of your knowledge, pregnant by two different men at once?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Until this case was brought to your attention, had you ever heard of a woman who was pregnant by two different men at once?”

  He nodded eagerly. “Yes, I had. There was something in the literature. I recall reading it, in medical school. There was a case in Europe where twins were born of different races. One white, one black. The mother was a prostitute.”

  Judith, to Naomi’s surprise, smiled at this. “A recent case?”

  “I believe not, no.”

  “Oh? Do you recall when this case occurred?”

  “It was an old case. It was in a book of nineteenth-century medical oddities.”

  Judith grinned, savoring this. “Nineteenth-century medical oddities,” she repeated. “And this was a required text in medical school?”

  The man blushed visibly. “No, probably not. Most likely I just read it in my spare time.”

  “Ah. Leisure reading, in other words.”

  “Yes.”

  “To provide a break from the legitimate medicine you were studying.”

  Charter objected, of course. Judith withdrew the question.

  “Are you aware of any more recent studies on superfecundation? Say, during this century? Controlled studies with published results?”

  He wasn’t, he said.

  “Did you search for any such studies before coming to testify here today?”

  “I made a search, yes,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything, but I wasn’t able to find it. I grant you, it’s not exactly in the mainstream of research.”

  “What about published case studies? Were there any cases of superfecundation written up in medical journals that you discovered?”

  He shook his head. “No. But again, it’s very possible they are out there. One day this will all be on computer, you know, and you’ll be able to just look it up. But for now it’s a matter of slogging through the literature, and there’s a good deal of it out there.”

  “Still,” Judith said unkindly, “nothing at all? You found not one reference to superfecundation? I mean, apart from nineteenth-century medical oddities?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Judith gave one of her deliberate, thoughtful nods. “So this was, to all intents and purposes, the first case of supposed twentieth-century superfecundation you had ever encountered.”

  “Well, yes.” He nodded.

  “Then I suppose it would be fair to say that you could not be considered an expert on superfecundation?”

  “I never claimed to be an expert,” he said hotly.

  “You were asked earlier, I believe, for an estimate based on your expertise.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “That is an expression.”

  Judith grinned. “So you are not, strictly speaking, an expert.”

  “No.”

  “Are you an expert on multiple births in general?”

  “I am not.”

  “What about on fertility?” Judith said.

  “Most ob-gyn specialists are somewhat expert on fertility,” he said, discernibly offended.

  “Do you have many patients who are seeking treatment for infertility?” Judith said.

  “I have many who come to me, yes,” he said.

  “And you treat them yourself,” she prodded.

  “Well, initially, yes. If they fail to become pregnant, I tend to refer them on.”

  “To an expert,” said Judith with satisfaction.

  “To an infertility specialist.”

  “By which you mea
n an obstetrician-gynecologist who is an expert on matters of fertility and infertility.”

  He saw where she was going. “Yes.”

  “So, by that token, I take it you do not consider yourself an expert in these matters.”

  “I do not consider myself a specialist. No.”

  “Doctor, at what point in your association with this case did you learn that police were investigating the deaths of not one but two infants?”

  He frowned. He had a rather offensive habit, Naomi noticed, of pressing the side of his nose with his forefinger, as if trying to clear the other nostril. “I believe it was about one week after my initial examination of the patient.”

  “So you had already completed your examination of Heather and submitted your findings.”

  “Well, I hadn’t submitted my findings. I had made notes, however.”

  “And did your initial findings, the ones based on the examination, include an opinion that Heather had recently given birth to more than one baby?”

  “I am only saying that that is a possibility. I am not claiming it as fact.”

  Judith asked him to listen carefully to the question, which she repeated.

  “No. My initial report included no mention of twins.”

  “So after you examined her, and after you had made your notes, but before you submitted your report to the prosecution in this case, you received a phone call from Mr. Charter. Is that right?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And what was the content of this phone call?”

  “That there was another baby. And could I please return and examine Heather a second time.”

  “To find evidence of a multiple birth, in other words.”

  “I was not instructed to find evidence, I can assure you.”

  “Perhaps not overtly, but that was the gist of it, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t understand your question,” the doctor said flatly.

  “Did you, in the course of your very thorough examination of my client, ever ask her about the circumstances of her pregnancy and her baby’s birth?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “She said that her labor had taken her by surprise and that she had given birth to her baby unassisted.”

  “She did not mention that she had had two babies, rather than one?”

  “No.”

  Judith smiled. “Doctor, did you see anything at all during either of your examinations of Heather that specifically suggested a multiple birth?”

  “It is impossible to say. Her uterus was returning to normal size. If I had been able to examine her closer to the birth I would have had more to go on.”

  She sighed. “Doctor, once again you are failing to answer my question. Let me repeat it: Did you see anything that specifically suggested a multiple birth?”

  His forefinger pressed his nostril. “No.”

  “And did you see anything that specifically contradicted the single birth Heather told you she had had?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  She thanked him, though not very graciously, and sat down.

  Charter rose and immediately put the doctor through his paces again. Superfecundation was possible. It was a recognized medical event, though rare. And there had been nothing, in his examinations of Heather, to rule out either it or twins in general.

  But the jury, Naomi thought, was not convinced. And Judith’s own witness, coming to testify next week, would put them over the edge. According to Judith, he had howled with laughter when informed that somebody was trying to prove superfecundation in a murder trial.

  They were getting there. They were almost there—almost out of the woods, if these woods were all that Charter could muster. There couldn’t be much left, Naomi thought. Judith expected only one prosecution witness to talk about blood groups, and a shrink, so barring surprises they were nearly finished with Charter and his fantasies. But how could there be any surprises? It was all crazy enough without them, and Charter was hardly going to produce his elusive Christopher Flynn now if he hadn’t already. Shrinks could say anything—Judith’s, undoubtedly, would place himself in total opposition to Charter’s, that was the nature of psychological testimony—and the blood-group testimony supported a thesis that she had already gone a long way toward discrediting. Naomi looked at her watch. It was two o’clock. If they could press on now, and if Charter didn’t drag out the afternoon with these last witnesses, then Judith might just possibly begin her case before the day ended. This was important, Naomi knew. Judith had said she wanted jurors to hear testimony for the defense before the weekend break. When they thought of the trial—as of course they would, despite Hayes’s admonitions to the contrary—she wanted them to think of her witnesses, not his.

  Charter, who did not share Judith’s incentive for expediency, asked for a short break before calling his next witness, a professor of hematology from the University of New Hampshire, but Hayes did not indulge him too far. “I’d like to move things along, Mr. Charter. Unless you are unprepared to do so.”

  “I am absolutely prepared,” Charter announced.

  “Good. Ten minutes, then.”

  Naomi moved up to Heather and tried to rouse her. The girl was slumped in her seat, looking vaguely at the window.

  “Come on, Heather. Hang in there.”

  “No.” She sounded dull. “No. I can’t do this.”

  “We’re almost done.”

  Judith, tersely, glanced at Naomi.

  “We’re getting there,” Naomi amended.

  “They talk about me. Like I’m not here.” She turned her head to look at Naomi. “How can they talk about me like that? How can they talk about … my period? My body? I don’t understand what it has to do with anything.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with it. You just have to hang on. Look,” she said, pressing Heather’s shoulder. She wanted her to turn around, to see the women in the back row in their white shirts. And Heather did turn. Simone raised a white rose in salute.

  “Who are they?” Heather said, uninterested.

  “Women who support you.”

  She leaned forward and put her head on the table. “I wish they’d go away,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I wish everyone would go away.”

  “Me too,” Naomi said. “Come on, here’s the judge.” She helped pull Heather back to a seated position, but the girl swayed. The slightest wind, Naomi thought, and she might blow away.

  They began again. Charter produced his professor of hematology, a young guy, rapidly shedding his blond hair, at least on the top of his head. For this he evidently compensated his vanity with an untrimmed beard and a rather pathetic skimp of a ponytail. He had brought a visual aid, a chart of phenotypes arrayed in an alphabet soup of A’s, B’s, and O’s. We each have two copies of genotype, he explained as the jury began—visibly, and from the outset—to glaze over. One from each parent. Some types are dominant: A and B trump 0, for example. Thus, if we receive an A from one parent and an 0 from the other, we have a blood type of A, but that recessive 0 hangs in there, waiting for a shot at the next generation, where it has a fifty-fifty chance of being passed on. Indeed, though the O genotype knuckles under to A or B, this does not prevent blood type O from being the most common phenotype among white Americans. Thus the prism of possible outcomes, the professor went on, rising from his chair to scribble equations on a large sheet of paper, angled for the jury: genotype to phenotype—which was “blood type” to the layman, he said, offhand, in case anybody was still following him. AO crossed with BO might produce AO, AB, BO, or OO, yielding, in that order, blood types A, AB, B, or O. And so on.

  Heather’s blood, said the professor, was type A, with a genotype AO. Ashley’s, as it happened, was the uncommon AB, as was Polly’s. The baby from Heather’s pond was A, with a genotype AA. The baby from the Sabbathday River, however, was OO.

  What this meant, in the English which Charter eventually extracted from his expert, was that Ashley might well be Polly’s fath
er, and was just as likely to have been the father of the baby in Heather’s pond. He could not possibly, however, have been the father of the Sabbathday River baby, if Heather was its mother. Heather’s second lover—the elusive Christopher Flynn, presumably—would have to have had blood type O. This (helpfully for Charter, Naomi thought) placed Mr. Flynn snugly within the majority of white American men.

  There was a brief interchange about the reliability of the testing, after which Charter got the witness to state his conclusions again. Then he sat down.

  Judith moved quickly. “Dr. Leslie,” she said, walking over to the scramble of letters on the professor’s work sheet, “can I just review some aspects of your findings for a moment?”

  Polly, she wanted it clear, was Ashley’s child.

  “Yes,” the man said. “The blood types are consistent with that.”

  And the pond baby. This infant was Ashley’s, too?

  “Certainly possible,” he said. “AA is a potential outcome of AA and AB.”

  “But the other baby, as I understand it, does not fit into the family picture quite as easily.”

  “No,” Professor Leslie said. “Mr. Deacon did not have an O to contribute to the Sabbathday River baby’s genotype. So for the Sabbathday River baby to have been the child of this mother, who did possess an O, an additional source of genotype would be required. Someone who also possessed an O.”

  “I see.” She stepped up close to the chart and peered at it; then she straightened, as if taken by some radical new thought. She faced him. “Dr. Leslie, if you were to take away the notion of the second father—the second source of an O, as you put it—this chart really makes no sense, does it?”

  He frowned. Perhaps, Naomi thought, Judith’s choice of term “makes no sense” offended him in some way, but after a moment he shrugged. He had, after all, only been considering the notion.

  “No. The additional source is necessary.”