Our stitches were taken out and we were all much more comfortable. We walked around the clinic, drifted into the nursery, joked with the nurses and maid. School was definitely over. As I walked down the corridor, I noticed a door open and looked in to see a room I’d never known was there. It was a tiny, dark room with three cots, each covered with coarse, inexpensive sheets, like the ones I had bought for our apartment, but which were not used on the patient’s beds. The room where the nurses slept at Madame Kladaki’s were obviously servants’ quarters.
The last day passed pleasantly, and I was getting eager to go home. But Sunday morning I woke with apprehension. How would the three of us ever get through the first week alone? Would we be able to get a maid? Where were my baby’s clothes? Would the laundress get them back in time? Where would the baby sleep? What-ifs and how-woulds raced through my mind. Maybe I could telephone Madame Kladaki in an emergency. But could I talk to her? We had trouble getting through to each other, except, mysteriously, during the birth. What would we do? What would we do with him?
My last breakfast came; the other girls had their usual lukewarm milk, which they all allowed to cool for half an hour before they drank it. I had asked if I could have coffee and was given a package of Nescafé. And the daily rusks. Just as I finished, the laundress came with my baby’s clothes and my own freshly washed and ironed maternity clothes—the only clothes I had. I paid her a hundred drachmas (about three dollars), and started to pack. Frieda and I said good-bye with promises to visit and call, then Marina came in and watched me pack. We tried to talk but couldn’t and she giggled and hugged me. Angela stood in the doorway dressed in a blue suit instead of the usual gray-green uniform. She looked utterly different, pretty, and seemed elated at the prospect of her day off. I imagined her at Omonia Square with a boy friend. (My naïveté about Greek life then! Such a thing would be unthinkable.) Even the taciturn cook smiled. Miss Elleadou had given me a bill the day before for $150, which I now paid. Frieda told me the Greek girls would pay appreciably less, but even so, this fee was cheaper by $200 than the prices I had been given by any other of the half-dozen Athenian doctors I had called.
Tips for the nurses had to be given. I said good-bye to Madame Kladaki with great feeling. I would come back in six weeks—it seemed forever. We kissed on both cheeks as Arno came running up the stairs. A cab was waiting, he said. He seemed excited and tense. Down the stairs and out on the street; the sunlight dazzled me. Someone handed me the baby.
Receipt from Madame Kladaki’s Maternity Clinic for 4.000 drachmas ($150), for baby delivery and post-birth care.
There was a loud chorus of good-byes. Marina and Angela saw us to the car, grinned, and kissed the baby good-bye.
Awkwardly, I stepped into the cab, holding Joshua in the pink-and-blue checked blanket Liesel had sent. How strange—he was ours now. We had claimed him from Marina and Angela, with our tips, perhaps.
The car started, Arno laughed, we careened through Athens with the sunlight, the brilliant sunlight, hitting the backs of our necks. He dozed in his swaddling clothes and blanket. I looked out on Athens settling down for its interminable afternoon. The three of us—two of us no longer—together; out there, a foreign, unknown city—a great adventure about to begin.
“I’ve got all the furniture from Liesel,” Arno said. “And I’m really knocked out. I was up all night reading Dr. Spock.”
I looked at him, pleased and touched. “I thought it would help if I knew something about it, too,” he said.
Suddenly, I felt it would all be all right. He would nurse and sleep, nurse and sleep. Somehow, he would be bathed and changed and dressed.
As we entered Kolonaki, I could see the old men drinking coffee and playing cards in the small café next door to the fruit store. It was good to be back. In the short two weeks this had become home. We turned up Karneadou Street; there were the men wiping off cars with the pink feather dusters, the porters taking their chairs in for the afternoon, the long, peaceful time of day, lazy and unconcerned. We smiled at each other and at him. It would be good. I could barely wait to get inside the door.
Chapter IV
Him
October 26, Monday night
Came home with Joshua yesterday afternoon. As soon as we hit the house, total, classical confusion. I try to change the baby and find I don’t know how to handle him when he squalls and kicks, let alone get him into a Greek diaper. I remember now that was one of the things Miss Elleadou was going to show us and didn’t. I finally got the baby changed and sat down to nurse him as Arno watched for the first time. I wondered if I looked as Madonna-like as I felt and had the uncomfortable impression that I was trying to look pure.
After he finished nursing, we arranged his crib and his clothing in the living room. We moved quickly, on tiptoe, but he woke and cried for several hours and seemed to have indigestion. Arno followed me from room to room, reading aloud from Dr. Spock while I juggled the screaming baby.
“Look under hiccups!” I said.
“Does he have hiccups?” Arno asked.
“No, but maybe it’ll say something.”
“Where’s the index?” he said. “Dammit.”
“Look under colic when you find it! Hurry!”
My confidence shattered, I nearly collapsed with exhaustion when the baby finally fell asleep.
Arno still has insomnia—I was trying to keep the baby from waking him. Up every three hours to nurse him. Banging plumbing all night.
October 27, Tuesday
I’m delighted with the name now and glad Arno wanted it. Joshua seems right for him. Tonight Arno said he could see a resemblance to himself for the first time. Baby very good all day. It’s a shame the first baby is cursed with nervous, frightened parents who can’t simply enjoy him, but worry and go around on tiptoes with caught breath half the time.
Meanwhile, we have no help, and I had to wash sheets and diapers today in the bathtub, and shopped for food, which left me completely tired out. Still weak. Arno shopped for a pacifier and diaper pail and made dinner for us for today and tomorrow—a delicious stew of beef and green noodles—and swept the floor. But we ought to have a woman to help out; perhaps in a few days I’ll be able to handle things better. Tonight I’m beginning to feel the household is under control and am fairly calm.
Joshua has been a prince all day and is already starting to sleep longer between feedings, but we still feel that we have brought forth into the world an enormous digestive tract. Arno says he looks like an amused octogenarian.
Dreamt of my little Siamese cat Emily last night. She was doing intricate, graceful acrobatic tricks on her slender hind legs and demanding applause. We got a letter from Ann, who is keeping both the cats, and all is well, although Charlotte, the other cat, is a little upset over Ann’s move uptown. How distant the cats seem. It’s so hard to believe that I ever felt so intensely about them and cried on leaving them behind. Is it because of Joshua? Or merely too many thousands of miles distance? Joshua, I suspect.
We received a letter from home. Arno’s mother writes that both she and Shirl dreamt I had a baby the night before he was born. Shirl dreamt so vividly that I had given birth to a boy that she phoned Arno’s mother and found they had just gotten our cable announcing it. This surprises me only because I was delivered of Josh ten days ahead of the due date.
October 29
A few weeks ago, I wrote to Alice’s sister, Mary, to find out more about Madame Kladaki’s clinic. The answer came today. Mary had been here for a couple of years while her husband taught at the university. She had two babies, one at a Greek hospital and one at Madame Kladaki’s. She writes about the first birth at the hospital:
It was filthy. Cigarette butts were all over. I felt that the doctors were sadistic, and the terrible screaming of the girls was unbearable. They told me I could have a natural birth, then left me alone, without instruction—like an animal—until I had to ask for an anesthetic. With the second baby I knew I wouldn’t
go back to a hospital. I had heard about Kyria Kladaki from another young woman. You asked how she started her clinic —I know that Kyria Kladaki had also experienced a terrible childbirth in Athens, surrounded by the screaming, crying, and carrying on, and that she had suffered greatly. She went to France to study the method of natural birth developed there by Dr. Lamaze and then returned to Athens, where she is a doctor in bad standing because of her work. But she provides a haven for the Greek women who seek her out and who run the gamut from very poor to very wealthy. She treats them at a great variety of prices—whatever they can comfortably afford. The girls pass on her praises by word of mouth, and you can be sure it has taken any woman who goes to her clinic great courage. The girls were funny sometimes. Once, when I was sitting in the waiting room, I crossed my legs. The ladies had a fit! They said it would twist the baby all up.
By the way, I want to add that the only woman I know of who died in childbirth, died in a Greek hospital. I give you the fact without drawing a moral—I don’t know the circumstances, and maybe it could have happened anywhere.
Kyria Kladaki is a true missionary. I hope I’ll see her again someday.
The only information in Mary’s letter that surprises me is her statement that the girls who went to Madame Kladaki were of all classes. When I was there, all the others had had some contact with non-Greek culture and were obviously middle- and upper-middle class. But how lucky I was to have found Liesel, and through her, the clinic, for it is still as underground as it was a couple of years ago, when Mary was in Athens. How would the average Greek girl, having a first baby and terrified by what she may have heard about the hospital, come to find out about that refuge on Bouboulinas Street? Had she chosen the site of her clinic for the name, come to think of it? Bouboulina was a heroine of the War of Independence.
October 31, Saturday
Halloween at home. Here, it is like an April evening. The baby sleeps. His eyes move back and forth behind the lids. Twelve days old. Does he dream? What images collect in such a sleepy dozen days? Of what to dream? Darkness? Light? The feel of the breast or the sensations of sucking? Perhaps a dim, moving shape? Maybe, instead, brilliant images of the world as it may shatter like fireworks against his pristine sight! Why assume vision comes slowly? When do dreams come? When do they first visit infants and animals?65
Joshua is turning into a fine-looking baby. He is beautiful to me. When he has occasional pains, he scoots across the bed now about a foot, using his legs like a frog.
With Joshua, nine days old, in the Karnadou Street apartment, October 1964.
Liesel visited tonight. She’s been very helpful, very generous.
Arno is working on an article for the Nation and, of course, the new novel. It’s like nothing he’s ever written before. He goes out a lot and we both miss having friends.
November 2, Monday
Saturday night Joshua started having colic. Tonight, five hours of holding, rocking, singing. Baby crying every time I put him down. It’s now 1:45 A.M., and I’m hoping he’s asleep, finally. I’m tense and exhausted. I had a horrifying moment in the middle of last night when I went to change him and the stump of his umbilical cord came off in my hand. Moment of panic when I thought of sticking it back on.
Arno has gone to the Plaka66 with some people he met yesterday. I hope he comes back feeling better. He is working so hard and the lack of friends and diversion is getting him down, which doesn’t help either of us.
November 5
Joshua was up on and off last night, screaming with colic between 4:00 and 6:00 A.M. I made him a little bottle of camomile tea, walked him, put a warm towel against his stomach, everything Miss Elleadou told me. Nothing helped. Finally, he fell asleep on my chest, and I lay down on the couch in the living room with him huddled under my neck, and we both slept a while. I think I hear him when I don’t, and when he does cry out, the sound cuts through my middle. My whole body listens and responds with an incredible, almost painful sensitivity. As I hear him cry from the other room, it is as if the crying is inside of me. I guess it’s an animal response. I can imagine how a cat, for instance, away from her kittens must hear them as much with her gut as her ears and races back to them in a panic. The feeling is uncomfortable enough to keep a mother very near her young. When I am so exhausted, this sensitivity to him is maddening. I find an occasional momentary desire to “take him back” to Madame Kladaki just to be able to sleep for one night.
During the day, however, he seems fine. I noticed yesterday that he can follow my hand with his eyes now. His little face is developing and his skin has begun to fit him. His brow is still quite wrinkled, though, it makes him look like a wizened leprechaun.
It is six months now since we sailed for Tangiers and I’m getting lonesome, homesick. I would like to go back to America.
November 6, Friday afternoon
The baby is two weeks old. Yesterday, exhausted, tense, weary. Total concentration on Joshua. The trouble is that our situation here is so unnatural. There are no friends dropping in, fussing over the baby; no doting relatives, no little gifts of clothing or toys to open—in short, none of the excitement, fun, even glamour, that comes with the newborn baby’s entrance into the family. We are totally cut off and I have no diversion at all. I am always listening, worried. Often, I think I hear him a moment or so before he actually cries—it is as though nothing separates us. Strange sensation of still being one with him. I suppose I listen so hard that I hear the slightest sound magnified, pick up sound at some other level than usual levels of audibility.
His cry, his voice, has a certain tone, like a note in music. I seem to listen for that. If I hear the tone from a radio, from the street, some stray sound that is “his” note, my middle freezes, then jumps. I say to Arno, “Do you hear him?” And he says, “Him? Why no, that’s outside.”
According to Dr. Spock, first babies get colicky and cry fretfully more often than babies who follow. He doesn’t go into it at all but, unless the implication is that the first baby is in some way different physically, obviously the parents must be at the root of the baby’s tension, because they, or at least the mother, is tense. Or angry. And I am aware of undertones of anger these days. I feel cut off from Arno, consumed by the baby. Up an hour, sleep three. I never dreamed a baby could take so much of one’s time and attention.
I have noticed that when he gets colicky, he tries to suck. I’ve read that you walk them and pat them and warm them, but none of it works. Last night, when he cried at 4:00 A.M., I decided that if he was making sucking motions with his mouth I would let him nurse, even though I didn’t think he could be hungry so soon after the 2:00 A.M. feeding.
Usually, I sit up when I nurse him, because Spock warns of smothering a newborn baby with the breast if the mother sleeps, but last night I was so tired that I lay down. It was completely relaxing; it seemed a very natural position, lying on my side with him cuddled next to me like a kitten in a litter. It put us both to sleep. With Joshua beside me nursing on and off as he chose, I rested decently for the first time since he’s been home. When I woke at eight, Joshua was having his breakfast.
But automatically I feel guilt. The feeling engendered in us that to follow our instincts, to gratify them, is somehow bad, unwholesome. Will spoil the baby. I’m troubled to find myself still carrying around such thoughts—perhaps reflexes is the better word.
Lying on the bed resting this afternoon, I imagined myself as an infant. Tried pantomiming nursing, swallowing, lying on my back as though being held in arms, as I have been holding him. I found it difficult in that position. In a more natural position, lying next to “mother,” for which I used a pillow, I found swallowing would be much easier, infant more comfortable. I could imagine the warmth and security of that position, and thought again of our cat lying sprawled out while her kittens took what they wanted.
No wonder he can sleep so well when he and I are as we should be. He is an infant animal and I his mother. Human distortions, sense o
f guilt and fear, anxiety.
Today, I hung a wooden corkscrew and toy on his crib. He stared at them for a full hour, fascinated. It looked to me as though his hand movements were attempts to touch, but perhaps it was random. He actually batted at the toy, though, when I moved him closer, and I’m quite sure that was not random.
I’m going to trust my instincts, throw off my fears, let him teach me what I must do. I’ve been trying to impose a way on him that is making him tense and wearing me out. Together, we’ll accommodate each other. Already, today, both he and I are more relaxed. But what is the fear I sense? Fear of being inconvenienced, taken over by the baby? Losing control of the situation, of myself, and/or him? In other words, losing the upper hand? Or is it deeper—fear of incest, for example, or the puritanical fears we have of real gratification, pleasure. Sixteen days old and the burden of being human is already socking the poor kid. To be human, one is deprived of the ordinary birthrights of any baby animal.
Baby had what looked like first erection; then wet me.
November 9
Letter from our cousin Thel yesterday in response to the photos Arno took when Joshua was nine days old. She says he is “beautifully developed for his age,” that he “looks as though he will be of big stature.” I don’t know what she means about being “developed,” but it is true that he doesn’t have the red, raw look I’ve seen on newborns. She says “his hands are exquisite and his head is beautiful.” I read the letter over and over again and tiptoe to stare down at the baby; it is the first voice from home. I feel good, profoundly good. I am deeply proud and have yearned to be patted and stroked for my achievement. The letter gives me my baby in a new way.
November 10
Since Katie taught me the magic word kemas (ground meat), we are—with the exception of an occasional chicken—beginning to live, quite unwillingly, on a diet of it. The vision I’d had of learning to cook the wonderful Greek food is going the way of the idyll about the Aegean shore, the maid, and the octopus. Instead, my hamburger and Southern-fried chicken recipes are reaching near-perfection.
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