Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  What a husband he was in those days, what a wonderful father-to-be, poring over Guttmacher, reading and rereading Thank You, Doctor Lamaze. If we could have, we, too, like Marjorie Karmel, would have called our doctor from the Café du Dome in Montparnasse on a night that “was fresh and full of the smell of earth that blows over Paris on a summer night.” Instead we would be calling him from a basement apartment in Greenwich Village. Never mind. Hadn’t we always told ourselves, and everyone else, that living in the Village was a lot like living on the Left Bank?

  I would not be able to Lamaze till the end, we figured, but surely I could do it for a few hours before caving in to twilight sleep or whatever it was they gave you. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could spare our baby from being born drowsy! So off we went to someplace on the Upper West Side, some small, shabby room with folding chairs, to watch a film on the birth of a baby according to Lamaze.

  Being there was like being in the old Needle Trades Auditorium—the same audience, mostly Jewish, with the same fierce thirst for information—and for one sick second or so I was once again waddling down the long corridor to the chair. But when the baby’s head began to show, a scarcely visible darkness between the thighs of a grimacing, panting woman, I cheered like the others and exchanged shy smiles with my companions in fecundity.

  My Lamaze instructor, Mrs. Bing, was, predictably, on the Upper West Side as well, in an apartment near the Museum of Natural History that was milky with light and had geraniums blooming along the windowsills. Later on, Mrs. Bing got rather famous for being a Lamaze pioneer, and when people told me they had been in one of her classes, I would let drop that I had known her when and had been tutored alone. I was boasting, of course, but I was also giving myself an excuse to recall those winter mornings and the sun scouring Mrs. Bing’s uncurtained windows. “Sink contraction, not pain,” she would order—her accent, like Dr. Franklin’s, was faintly Germanic—and I would obey. “Huff! Now puff! Now do your effleurage.”

  I huffed, I puffed, I did my effleurage, brushing my hands in a circular movement over my belly, and when I got home I did it all over again. After dinner, B., my monitrice, would sit in the chaise longue, watch in hand, timing me while I, supine on the bed, practiced the three stages of breathing.

  “Not long enough! Do it again!” I’d do it again.

  “Did you do that effleurage right?” Yessir!

  It is curious. I can see the white light and the bare floorboards in Mrs. Bing’s living room, and the pots of geraniums on the windowsills, but I can no longer see the building. Which one of the big apartment houses up by the museum is it? I cannot tell. No doorway catches my eye, no trees or clumps of bushes clutch at my memory. But it is there somewhere, I know, the place where I huffed and puffed and rubbed my stomach and held my breath for . . . how many counts was it? One of those old behemoths still holds that big, high-ceilinged room, and that room still holds my joy, and if I am sad whenever I am in the neighborhood, it is because it is a cruelty to have known perfect happiness. Up there, up near the dinosaur eggs and the trumpeting elephants, I am once again that young woman with the big belly and my Kate is once again sleeping peacefully in the amniotic sac, and my heart breaks for both of us.

  I awoke on March 17, waiting. “They never come when they’re supposed to,” I told B., and sent him off to work. All day long I waited, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the bathtub, longing for the moment when, like somebody in the movies, I would bend over, clutch my stomach with both hands, and say—to whom ? I was alone—“I think it’s time.” Meanwhile the baby was quiet, scarcely moving, hardly even stretching her legs. I know she could hear, but could she see? Do babies keep their eyes closed until they’re born? Or do they open them, look around, study the terrain?

  After supper, we went to the movies. With no baby yet in view, of course we would go to the movies. We saw Our Man in Havana, in Times Square, where Irish and Irish-for-a-day drunks were roistering down Broadway.

  The next morning, on the dot of 8:30, I felt a dull ache in my back, which was repeated about fifteen minutes later.

  “The baby’s coming,” I said, as cool and know-it-all as I had been the day before. “But it’s going to take hours, so you just go off to work.” My husband, obedient to the superb creature I had become, did as he was told.

  So much to do! I had to go to the A & P so that B. would have something to eat for the next few days. Then I had to pick up the slipcovers I had left at the cleaner’s so the living room would look nice. Waiting for the cleaner to find them, trying to distract myself from the contractions (“Don’t sink pain!” Mrs. Bing was hissing into my ear. “Sink contraction!”), I studied the little plastic bird on the counter. It kept dipping its head, up, down, up, down, toward a glass of water. I will never forget this bird, I said to myself. I will never forget this moment.

  “I’m in labor, I’m in labor,” I wanted to shout to the people I passed on Seventh Avenue on the walk home. “Look at me, look at me, look at how it’s done!”

  On my hands and knees, I crawled around the couch and loveseat, closing the snaps that held the slipcovers to the tapes sewn to their undersides. Finished! I washed every dish, did a last run with the vacuum cleaner. Finished! I ate my favorite lunch, egg salad on white. Finished! And at last I crawled onto the chaise longue with Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond. I loved that book. Who wouldn’t love a book that began “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”? But after a while I could no longer rise to Macaulay’s High Anglican empyrean and dialed B. “Come home,” I said, still calm, still grand.

  Because we thought overnight cases tacky, bourgeois, my nightgowns and toothbrush were in a paper shopping bag, along with a handful of lollipops that were supposed to provide glucose when my energy flagged during labor. Together, with B. carrying the shopping bag, we walked out the door and up Perry Street to Seventh Avenue, and together we directed a cabdriver: “Doctors Hospital.”

  “Doctors Hospital?” the driver said. “I hear that’s some place. Jackie Gleason was just there, and they tell me the parties were something.”

  Judy Garland dried out in Doctors Hospital, I believe, and it was a nice place to go after a suicide attempt and an even nicer place to go if you were having a baby, because it had room service. Queenly in my wheelchair, I watched while B. fumbled in his wallet for his Blue Cross card. Gracious even with an enema tube dangling from my backside, I chatted with the nurse while she shaved my pubic hair, faithful to my parents’ creed that small talk could raise you above anything. Because I felt the pains—oh, no, the contractions—in my back, B. and my doctor did the effleurage for me, circling their hands over my spine while I lay on my left side, facing a bureau and focusing on a drawer pull. Only once was there a break in my Lamaze breathing. B. had ordered a sandwich, and the crunch of the pickle he was chewing distracted me. “Stop that pickle,” I said. He stopped.

  “Look,” the doctor said, rolling me on my back and shining a bridge lamp between my parted knees. What pleasure to lie with my legs spread, pubis shaved, blood trickling, stomach swollen, an inch or so of dark head visible in my vagina, and nothing on a man’s face but love and joy.

  In the labor room, or so I understood, there were rails on the beds so the maniac maternals wouldn’t fall to the floor. But here I was in a wooden four-poster, while a light snow drifted past the window. The window was slightly open, and through it I could hear the faraway whine of traffic fourteen floors down on East End Avenue. Sometimes the curtain rustled; sometimes there was a footfall in the corridor. There was no other sound beyond my “Huh, huh, huh, huuuuuuh.” “The baby’s crowning,” the doctor said to B. “Help me wheel her to the delivery room.”

  Something happened next, a coincidence, which would be unacceptable in fiction and is barely acceptable in fact. But for one who believed then that the mills of the gods do indeed grind, it seemed reasonable, predictable even. On t
he way into the delivery room, we were stopped by a doctor who said to my obstetrician, “Do you want any help, Elliott?” He did not recognize me, but I did him. He was the doctor who had said I was too frail to carry a child and medicated me with a contraceptive. “No,” I replied before my doctor could open his mouth, and we sailed on.

  I had imagined bright lights and white-robed, white-masked nurses flanking the table, not a small, quiet room empty except for a nurse who was putting kidney-shaped bowls in a cabinet. No matter. I needed no encouragement, no towels dabbed on the forehead, only the doctor’s “Push . . . stop . . . pant . . . push . . . stop.” And at last, “Here’s the head . . . I’ve got the shoulder . . . Mary, it’s a girl.”

  “It’s Katherine,” I said, and let go of the handgrips.

  Dying, even if the crossover is accomplished with a fanfare of bugles and the raising of a golden curtain, cannot be so profound a shock as the birth of a child. Nothing, not all the reading, not all the line drawings, not Mrs. Bing’s big cardboard-mounted pictures of a baby traveling down the birth canal, had prepared me for the sight of a human being emerging from between my legs. Katherine had dark hair, two deep dimples, and was yelling.

  The nurse, through finally with the kidney-shaped bowls, dried the baby with a towel, slid her into a diaper and a slightly tattered, too-big shirt, and said, “Ooh, look! She’s got dimples.”

  “Will she keep them?”

  The doctor, sitting between my knees with his head bent over a needle and thread—he was sewing up the episiotomy and looked like a tailor—laughed. So did the nurse, as she tried to hand me the baby.

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to hold her?” she asked, and again I said no.

  “I might drop her.”

  They started laughing again but stopped abruptly, because I had started to shake. There was no controlling it; even my legs were trembling. The nurse gave up and took the baby away. I gave up, too, and closed my eyes while the doctor wheeled me back to my room and to B., who had just become a father.

  “Shut the window,” I said, trying to talk over what was happening to me. “Shut it. Don’t let me get near it. Please, I want bed rails.”

  A carpenter came and nailed the window to the sill. Ridiculous, I thought as he hammered. I can jump through the pane. I heard the sound of breaking glass, felt myself hurtling with the baby in my arms, heard the splat when we hit the ground.

  “Don’t leave me alone. Get a nurse. Put me out.”

  A fat Irishwoman came and settled herself into the chair in the corner. Another doctor came in and injected something into my arm. The last thing I saw was the light and the hope fading from my husband’s eyes, and the last thing I thought was that my baby, ejected now from the fortress that was myself, would never be safe again.

  For years I could not think about, much less talk about, those weeks that followed my first child’s birth. Now I can report, but I cannot interpret. Compulsion, depression, anxiety: I can work up a song and dance about them. Psychosis—there! I took the easy way out, I gave horror a name—is beyond analysis.

  Dr. Franklin arrived the next morning. He came every morning after that and held my hand, and although I cannot remember what I said to him, I do remember that I said nothing to B., afraid that if I diverted one word from my psychiatrist I would weaken the lifeline that was slowly, and finally, beginning to connect me to him.

  Besides, Dr. Franklin would not be horrified by what he was hearing, any more than he would have fainted while watching an operation. My husband, however, was not equipped to deal with sickness, or so I felt and so I still believe. If he could look into my head, I figured, he would run away. Still, my having excluded him from my madness must have seemed yet another way of excluding him from my life.

  I begged my obstetrician to tie me to the bed. He would not. I begged him to move me to the psychiatric floor. He would not. How could I nurse the baby, he asked, if I were that far from the nursery? Strange. I, mad, knew what should be done. He, sane, would not do it.

  One night the fat Irish nurse fell asleep in the chair and I, staring across the bed rails at her plump, pink, piggy face, panicked and woke her. “I saw on your admission form that you’re a Catholic,” she said. “Pray.”

  The hospital was full of wanderers, most of them diaper service salesmen popping up unexpectedly in one’s doorway. But once a woman dispensing religious tracts slipped into my room and spilled badly printed exhortations all over my bed. She was trying to enlist me in Jehovah’s Witnesses. Another time a nurse, young and pretty and so thin she scarcely left a shadow, slipped into my room and told me that nerves were the price one had to pay for being as delicately attuned, as sensitive, as we. Meanwhile the fat Irish nurse mumbled her Hail Marys and then, nodding off, as always, at midnight, left me to the devil.

  When the nurse who worked the evening shift in the nursery, and who brushed Katherine’s hair into different dos—sometimes parted down the side, sometimes down the center—brought her to me for a feeding, I would not let her leave, because the old Irishwoman ran off down the hall then to her cronies, leaving me free to crash the window with my beautiful, innocent baby in my arms. Early one morning, when the Irishwoman left to get my orange juice, I got out of bed and baptized my daughter with water from the lavatory faucet. At least she would go without original sin.

  Friends came to visit. I smiled, I chatted, and if any of them wondered why there were rails on my bed, they never did so aloud. B. came every night, stopping first at the nursery to peer through the glass at his daughter, and told me who had called, who had written, what his parents had said, who had invited him for dinner. When my breasts swelled to blue-veined white globes—“You’ve got enough milk to feed every kid in the nursery,” the night nurse crowed—he arrived, unasked, with nursing bras. “Size 40c,” he said proudly, taking my abundance for his own.

  “If you’ll just let me out of here, away from this window,” I said to my doctor, “I’ll be all right.” So he released me from the hospital a day early, and back I went to our basement apartment, frantic to feel nothing but Manhattan underfoot. But first we watched while the nurse dressed our child in the clothes B. had brought from home, gasping when she broke off the withered stub of the umbilical cord. Then she swaddled Katherine in the lacy knitted blanket and stuck the lucky booties on her feet and handed her to B., who smiled to see his baby, his lamb, in his arms.

  Just as I had thought overnight cases bourgeois, so I thought a baby nurse a sinful self-indulgence. So I had asked our cleaning woman, Mamie, who claimed some acquaintance with infant care, to come in for a few hours every day for the week after I came home from the hospital. She came once, then never again, and when chided by a neighbor said cheerfully, “You know me, Miz Gibney. Can’t handle responsibility.”

  For two days I sat alone, holding the baby until B. came home from work, afraid that if I put her down for more than a minute, she would stop breathing. I nursed her, too, although my nipples were cracked and bleeding, because I was afraid I would make mistakes with a formula. On the third day Hoppy, a practical nurse, arrived.

  Hoppy was Jamaican, short and round and brown, and when she walked, her starched white uniform crackled and her spotless white shoes squeaked. She slung Katherine over her shoulder, rather like a dishrag, and commandeered the apartment, whistling or singing (“You’ve got to get them used to noise”) as she moved from room to room. When Hoppy swaddled Katherine in a receiving blanket, it was because she “needs the comfort”; when she made me nurse the baby every time she cried, hungry or no, it was because she “needs the comfort”; when she asked Katherine, “Do they speak Latin where you come from?” I knew that like me, she believed in a room up in heaven where babies waited to be called to earth. When Hoppy was there, my daughter was safe, and until the night B. told me about Lewis, so was I.

  Lewis, the first child of another editor and his wife, was four weeks old. “Kate’s got a date for the junior
prom,” his father said when Katherine was born, and he sent her a split of champagne in his son’s name. A few days before her birth, we had had dinner at their house and I had given Lewis his bottle, “for practice,” his mother had said. Now he was dead, B. said, with tears in his eyes, and he had not wanted to tell me but had to for fear I might call Lewis’s mother one bright morning and say, “How is Lewis? How are his burps?”

  There were tears in my eyes, too, but Hoppy said, “No, no, Mrs. L., you’ll spoil the baby’s milk if you cry.” So I didn’t cry, and wondered if there had been something wrong in the way I had held the bottle.

  That night, lying beside my daughter, whose bassinet I had put next to the bed so I could listen to her breathing, my right hand holding down my left so that I could not close them around the tiny neck and squeeze, I resolved that whenever I felt the urge to kill someone, I would redirect it and kill myself instead. The relief was tremendous.

  Many nights I slept on the living room couch, leaving my husband alone in the bedroom with Kate. She was safe with him. Often I would stare at the tiny, pulsing fontanel, thinking of how easily my long strong thumb could crush it. Her neck was so little one hand could break it. I would not bathe her. My husband did. He thought I was afraid she would slip. I was afraid I would push. But every time I felt my hands moving or realized that my eyes had been too long on her neck, her head, I determined again to harm myself before I could harm her. The decision to die is a great restorative.

  After six weeks the sickness trailed away, dispersing in shreds, like clouds lifting. The fear of heights did not. Day after day Dr. Franklin stood me next to his twelfth-story window, put both his arms around me so I would feel secure, and said, “Tell me what you see.”