A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  The crowd gathered round the table. We took off his striped shorts and diaper. I felt giddy and terribly worried. My mother-in-law came into the room and left quickly, refusing to watch. When the icy anesthetic was sprayed on him, Josh began to cry. He tried to wave his arms but they were pinned, and he screamed with fright and surprise. There was nothing for me to do but go to him. “Give him his bottle,” said the moyl. “It will take his mind off it.”

  “But he won’t drink a bottle.” I filled one quickly though, and tried to put it to his lips and, as he had for the past month, Joshua refused anything but the breast. I leaned over him, our faces inches apart and spoke to him. He stared up at me from the board and screamed and sobbed. I could feel the moyl working, cutting the foreskin, stared at my baby, spoke steadily, held him, our eyes locked—his frightened and angry, as though I were betraying him. And so we were, for what seemed an endless time.

  I did not even know my father had stepped forward to hold his legs, and when the foreskin came away and the tiny organ was revealed, red and raw, my father, holding the small legs, buckled and asked my brother for a whisky. I did not hear. I spoke to Arno, who stood by, and felt the crowd, heard laughter and whispers, and realized dimly that the ordeal was probably not so terrible as it seemed, and yet my son cried and held me reproachfully with his eyes for the first time, and time did not move for me.

  Finally, it was done. The dressing was put on, and I stepped back as the moyl released his arms and legs, and picked him up, arranging the diaper, the blue-and-white pants. The crying ceased. Shoulson held him in his arms and made a joke or two. Then he continued with the ceremony. He prayed in Hebrew in half-chant, half-song. Then in English. His robe was white and the front embroidered in heavy silver thread. Brown-bearded, white-capped, shining in silver and silk, he held my baby and prayed.

  “And prolong the life of this infant—Amen.”

  I heard the rich syllables of the Hebrew name for the first time: Yehoshua ben Chuna. Joshua, son of Arno. We said Amen. Wine was poured. “Why is everyone crying?” I asked.

  Arno and his brother embraced and I took Joshua upstairs to nurse him. Later, the moyl told us that there had been a complication—the baby had been born, he said, “with a great redundancy of foreskin.” I flushed with a kind of blank pride, as though told one had acquitted oneself with a flourish, made an especially fine arabesque.

  He cried on and off for the rest of the evening. Arno fixed his aspirin, and, since he was crying, to my distress, at the sight of me (he associated my face with his afternoon ordeal), his father put him to sleep, carrying him back and forth in the darkened room, and then tried to convince me I had not betrayed my son.

  As I waited outside the room, I realized how much we have changed in the past three months; how much I have learned about loving. I had expected that, like a little girl mocking love to her doll, my love would at once envelop my baby; instead, I had to learn it, grow into it. Love doesn’t come from the child’s cooing and smiling, his cuteness or beauty. We are rewarded by these things at odd moments. Love comes gradually with our worry, relief, and care—with what we have invested of ourselves. We must learn the loving of a first child step by step, as we learn to sustain love in marriage. The loving of a first baby is like an acquired gift, or skill. The second child, I imagine, comes into that love ready-made.

  These days, surrounded by his family, Arno seems different with the baby, as though other people, acknowledging the relationship between him and his child (that great, binding link, again) help him, too, to feel it, make it real. The extended family works to make a family of us; the symbolically linked hands and crossed arms of godfather, father, grandfather at the briss, the sense of generations of males, gives my husband a place to stand with his son.

  And so, through one little crisis, one painful shot and a sore vaccination, many nights of crying and hurried consultation, and now the tiny, wounded cock, we begin to be parents, and Joshua is truly, profoundly, ours.

  During the next week in Philly, trying to get hold of America again. Shocking—the clothes, the ease, the sense of diversity. (On the street a well-dressed lady is actually enjoying a joking conversation with the mailman.) Truly anyone can be from anywhere, all faces are not marked with the same stamp of common ancestry, no bit of earth or stone has been walked on for millennia. The brute rawness, the power of the country are exhilarating, and I, who thought I wanted statues and thatched cottages and ancient halls, find myself absurdly thrilled at the sight of gas tanks, factories, and high-tension wires—one more American who had to go to Europe to find home.

  At the end of the week, as we were about to leave for Cleveland to visit my family, the package came from Greece with the records Liesel had given us the last day. We sat with Arno’s parents in the living room; the baby lay on the floor bunching up the pages of a magazine and trying to stuff them in his mouth. Strose to stroma sou—the small chorus of men’s voices sang the music of Theodorakis, since popular as Zorba’s song, music we had heard in tavernas and on the street. We had been describing the horrors of Greek bureaucracy to the family. Now, as the music wailed out, lilting, sentimental, and familiar, four months of loneliness, and often frustration, dissolved. To my disgust, my eyes misted, and I stole a glance at Arno, whose voice had trailed off.

  The time of birth, Karneadou Street, Quasimodo, even the swindler Dinos, had suddenly become enambered, crystallized for a lifetime in a snatch of song. I knew at this moment that for me, our time in Athens had become not life, but distorted, abbreviated—like Liesel’s room in Purdue, utterly precious and still utterly alive—in short, it had become a memory.

  Afterword

  I LOOK AT A BOOK OF COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS OF A BIRTH. UNEXPECTEDLY, TEARS begin to stream down my cheeks. It is not sentiment and not sadness, not even joy. I have borne two babies. Why then am I so gripped by the sight of the distorted face pushing its way out from the draped green sheets; the bloody body lying across its mother at the end, or rather, the beginning? Woeful. Triumphant.

  I am trying to find a word for the emotion, or force, that brought the flood of tears, and I think of the evening almost three years ago, when Arno and I watched the film of a natural birth by the Lamaze method at the Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital auditorium, in preparation for our second child. (It was the film Miss Elleadou had never gotten around to showing us in Athens.)

  We watched the film with the nervously giggling audience of pregnant women and their husbands, and at the moment of actual birth I began to have a great urge to cry, a powerful, wracking impulse to sob uncontrollably. It came from the diaphragm, from the guts. I thought, “Stop it, you’re being silly. Neurotic. What’s wrong?”

  But when the lights came on, the audience was full of handkerchiefs and red eyes. The plain, rather tough-looking woman next to me, pregnant with her third child, said, “I brought two hankies, because last time I saw it, I blubbered for ten blocks to 97th Street.”

  The next week at our lesson, when our instructor played the recording of a birth, again the urge was there, this time just before the baby’s cry was heard. For even on the French recording we could sense the actual seconds of birth. I knew the class and I knew for sure that the women who caught their breath and rubbed at their eyes were all women who, like myself, had already borne a child. Those going through it for the first time didn’t react. Was it, for us veterans, a confirmation that it would, indeed, once again all come right? That God was in heaven and that the miracle would be performed once more and we could truly count on it? Or was it release of an incredible tension as we saw the event we had been too busy living to be moved by? Were we, as women, really the instrument on which this magnificent theme was being played?

  We participate in the cosmos. Our wedding day makes us princess or queen for an afternoon or night. We play dress-up and rehearse. In giving birth, each woman becomes goddess, and does it naked. When we are on that table, there are no seed pearls and satin, nor bouquets. It is perhaps
the one major event of our grown lives for which we do not have our hair done.

  Men don’t share any great physical trauma, except in wars and basic training, and these bring men close, as birth unites women.

  When a man hears so-and-so is getting married or else that so-and-so’s wife is pregnant, he may shrug, question the match, or comment on good or bad timing. A woman will always say—and mean it—(unless she has reason to be jealous) “wonderful!” Even if she knows it may not indeed be a wonderful thing in reality.

  John Fowles has a character say in his book The Magus that man sees objects, but a woman sees the relationship between those objects.101 Is the emphatic “Wonderful!” that pops out of the woman’s mouth when faced with marriage or birth a mindless celebration of relationship? Joy, simply, in the on-goingness of things? Confirmation that once again the pact she has with life has been kept?

  Great mystery aside, I can remember thinking at the birth of my second child—like some irritable landlady—after an hour of intense discomfort on the delivery table: “Get out already, you bastard,” then felt ashamed, because I should be having fond thoughts of future maternal joys. In the sterile green room under the big light, a 200-pound intern leaned his elbow on my belly and put his full force behind it, pushing the baby into the world. But despite these lapses, I must have been romantic about the birth of Eli, because I am still convinced the doctor held the baby up saying, “Unto you a son is given,” and I know he said no such thing. I turned my head and saw Arno in the white medical coat, smiling.

  So the second child arrived, and I was wheeled upstairs in the big hospital. How unlike Kyria Kladaki’s little clinic in Athens, where I walked out holding the baby. But in spite of the superior training and the careful American maternity ward, I think I liked the stay in Athens better—it was more human, more womanly.

  Postscript

  A Stubborn Little Hold on Life102

  A Room in Athens celebrates childbirth and motherhood, which for my mother brought a special fulfillment, in part because she had endured both a miscarriage and an abortion. In her published diary, which appeared while abortion was still illegal in the United States, she remarks, when considering baby names, that “I had lost two pregnancies”—but their loss was more significant to her than this necessarily oblique mention would indicate.

  I think it worthwhile to append her diary-description of her abortion, written several years before her trip to Greece, because it illuminates why she so cherished her pregnancy and new infant, and because it is a compelling voice from the time before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, in 1973. She conveys, in a few paragraphs, the quintessential image of the illegal abortion in the squalid hotel room, and the shame, danger, fear, isolation, and pain which she, and countless other women and girls, had suffered.

  In the spring of 1958, in Manhattan, my mother was twenty and working at Mademoiselle magazine. She and my father were deeply in love but not yet married and were living in different cities. The first diary excerpt below describes an April evening when he arrived for a visit with her in New York. She did not tell him about her subsequent pregnancy. Nearly four months later, in Cleveland, Ohio, where she had grown up, she had the abortion. She is attended by a masked doctor, whom she calls a “stranger,” and by a “middle-man,” who had arranged the abortion with her older brother, without their family’s knowledge. The scene, the secret destruction of her unborn child in an unlit room, surrounded by violence, is both literally and figuratively the dark antithesis of the childbirth scene in A Room in Athens and of her girlhood dream of childbirth with “sunlight, Bach, and poetry.”

  My mother never made peace with her decision, for which she carried a profound grief, remorse, and sense of loss. Through the years, on the date of the abortion, she noted it in her diary. On June 23, 1969—by then divorced with two young sons, she would write: “11 years since that night in the hotel…felt I wanted to light a candle for that child, who would be ten years old.”—JK

  Cleveland

  April 2, 1959, 4:40 P.M.

  A year ago, at this moment, I picked up my purse and my coat and moved from the desk at Mademoiselle to go to the john, where I began the combing, the wondering, the making ready to meet. We had been separated for half a year and I didn’t know what it would be like. Trembling, I left the washroom and took the crowded elevator down to the lobby. I stepped out and started to walk for the door, looking to see if he was about. Suddenly, his voice, himself. He was walking beside me. “Hello,” he smiled, and I smiled back. He guided me out into the rush-hour street. Buses, cabs, cars, motorcycles, people. Madison Avenue at 5:00. That night, I conceived a child…

  [Undated entry]

  Ten days after my mother died, I was lying in a hotel room in Cleveland. Feeling ridiculous, I had given the name “June White” at the desk. The walls were a dingy pale green and the rug, with its pattern of interlocked circles, was fading. It seemed as though they were pulling and tugging with great force at a gigantic, stubborn tooth, absurdly located at my exact center. The local anesthetic they had given me was not working but I can’t remember much about the pain. I remember holding my hand out, forcing it upon a pudgy hand wearing a mason’s ring, and disliking myself for needing him. Stranger and middle-man in a rushed, uneasy business deal my brother had arranged, with children at home and a wife. He took my hand and held it and I was glad for that. Between gasps, embarrassed by my position on the bed, and fleetingly aware of being naked and alone with two strange men, one masked so that I could barely make out his eyes in the half-light coming from the open bathroom door. I think it was I who had asked them to shut off the ceiling light. It had been too bright for me, and I didn’t care to be seen, or to see myself, or what was going on. They had enough light to see what they were doing, and I guess a lot of it was done by feel. I had begged them to be careful, earlier. “I want to have children—someday.” “All right, then,” the middle-man had said. I thought he seemed surprised that an immoral woman like myself should hope one day for a husband and a family. The fear I had earlier, that I would be unconscious and that they might steal my mother’s wedding ring from off my hand, had dissipated. It had been almost my major fear.

  People passed by the door; from my position at the side of the bed I could see light coming from the open transom. I could hear somewhere nearby a fight between a woman and a man, and the sound of blows, as though he were slapping her. I kept my mouth shut as they struggled with the stubborn tooth-like thing, trying not to cry out. I clutched at the warm, fat hand and scratched my nails on the sheet when the pain got bad. It seemed like a long time. As they worked on me they talked, and I understood that something was wrong, although they whispered in monosyllables. Mostly, I kept hearing the word “dilation.” I gathered it was in the wrong position, a different one than they had expected. There were a few more tugs, and then some yanks so strong that my body slid a little bit across the bed and my eyes teared with pain. I tried to keep myself from going with the pincers, which I imagined to be huge from the way they felt—like medieval pincers used to pull out martyrs’ teeth. The creature did not budge. But I remember I felt proud of it—him—of that stubborn little hold on life that he had taken in the four months I had him lying within. It seemed right. He would have been like his father. I thought of him in New York. It must have been hot today, and he didn’t know what was happening to me.

  Finally, after a long time, he let go, and I felt a rush of water. It was warm; then they held a cold glass jar between my legs and I heard a plop and felt relieved of pain. They packed me with napkins I had brought, and took the $550. I thought it decent of them not to count the bills. Then the doctor in the mask took everything into the other room. I was alone for a moment. From the bathroom I heard the sound of the glass jars against the porcelain sink, and then the sound of the toilet flushing.

  I got dressed, met my friend R. downstairs, and we went home. My father asked me how the show was when we got back, and I said we ha
d a good time.

  It still bothers me. The sound of that toilet. I used to think, for the first week after, of my baby floating in the sewer, and I used to cry. I don’t cry about it much when I think about it now, but I still remember it and think of the shock on the creature, warm and safe one moment, then the toilet and the water, and the vast sewer system underneath the city. He was mine. I don’t really know if it was a boy; I asked the middle-man with the ring but he wouldn’t say. “The less you know about it, the better,” he said. He was really not unkind at all. I think he was probably right.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 the secret womb of the diary: Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955, vol. 5. Gunther Stuhlmann (Ed.). New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. p. 84.

  2 Never on Sunday (1960): a comedy about an American tourist in Greece who tries to reform a carefree prostitute with a heart of gold (Melina Mercouri); Topkapi (1964): a suspense film about a caper to steal a jeweled dagger from a museum in Istanbul; Zorba the Greek (1964): a tale of an exuberant Greek peasant (Anthony Quinn) and an inhibited Englishman, based on the 1946 novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis.

  3 bouzouki music: Greek folk music played on a bouzouki—a long-necked, pear-shaped, stringed instrument, similar to a mandolin.

  4 in the Western imagination: see, e.g., Goldworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998; Roessel, David. In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

  5 the Near East during pregnancy: among the earliest women writers to travel in the region while pregnant were Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and Lady Mary Nisbet (1778–1855), whose letters were posthumously published, in 1926.