The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

I couldn’t be angry. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t curse fate. I couldn’t answer Daddy’s anguished, “Why? Why? Why did it have to happen to my Tass?” All I could say was, “It was Mommy’s time to go.”

  But that didn’t lessen the loss, not for Daddy, not for me, not for Donna and Jeanette and Linda and Rita. It was not just that Mommy was our mother. She had played in the band with us. She was one of the Thornton Sisters. She was one of us, and we had taken her for granted. Because Daddy was the talker and she was the quiet one, had we given her enough credit? Had we given her enough love? I still wonder.

  13

  A Labor of Love

  ON MOTHER’S DAY, the year before Mommy died, I telephoned a florist in Long Branch to have roses delivered to Mrs. Itasker Thornton. Mommy and Daddy were a devoted couple but not a demonstrative one; they never kissed or hugged in public, nor exchanged gifts, nor did Daddy ever bring home flowers, so I took it upon myself, after I grew up, to see that Mommy received a bouquet on her birthday and holidays. That last year I was on-call at the hospital in New York and didn’t get free until late in the day to telephone home.

  “Hi, Mommy. Happy Mother’s Day. How’d you like the flowers?”

  She thought I was joking. “Those beautiful invisible ones?”

  “You didn’t get the roses I ordered?” She could hear the upset in my voice and tried to reassure me.

  “Honey, I don’t need roses. All I need is you to call once in a while to let me know how you’re doing.”

  The florist apologized at length, saying they’d had so many orders that day that mine had somehow fallen through the cracks. Still, I felt that I had let Mommy down, like the time she waited in the attic at school for the promised check that never came.

  I thought of this when we went to choose the flowers for Mommy’s funeral. I asked the florist if he remembered me, that I was the person who had ordered flowers last Mother’s Day that had never arrived. “Oh, I remember, Dr. Thornton. We felt so bad.”

  “Now the flowers are for her grave,” I said harshly. I suppose I should not have made a point of it, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that Mommy had somehow missed out all through her life on the rewards she had earned with her patience, her fairness, her sweetness.

  When it came time to make the funeral arrangements, we wondered if Daddy was going to be able to get through the ordeal.

  “I’ll make it,” he mumbled. “I got to do it for Tass. But you girls had better come with me ‘cause I don’t know about dresses and stuff.”

  The funeral parlor in Asbury Park was run by blacks for blacks, and the director kept assuring us we had come to the right place, telling us that, “A black person in a white funeral parlor, they don’t know the makeup, they don’t know what to do with the hair.” He led us all downstairs to choose a casket.

  “No pine box.” Daddy was adamant about that. “My wife’s got to have a lead casket so nothin’ can get in at her.”

  “A pillow for her head?”

  “A satin pillow.”

  “A coverlet, of course.”

  “Make that satin, too.”

  Back in his office, the funeral director suggested that we be seated while he figured the charges, but Daddy continued to stand, as though braced to bolt if it all became more than he could bear. There was an ancient adding machine on the funeral directors rolltop desk, and each time the director punched in a charge, he yanked the rasping handle of the machine down. “For the casket. …” Scrunch. “For the pillow….” Scrunch. “For the coverlet.…” Scrunch. “For the renting of the hall …” Scrunch.

  With each scrunch, he ground down our hearts. The ugly sound was so disrespectful, so emphatically mercenary, so final, as though he were driving nails into the lid of Mommy’s coffin.

  “Being as how you’ve only got daughters,” the director said over his shoulder to Daddy, “you’ll need six pallbearers. Pallbearers …”

  “Hold it!” The noise of the adding machine had sanded Daddy’s nerves raw and he began to scream. “Nobody’s touchin’ my wife! Nobody’s touchin’ my wife! Nobody’s touchin’ my wife!”

  “Daddy … Daddy, its okay.…”

  “Nobody’s touchin’ Tass!”

  “Uncle Reggie, Uncle Milford …”

  ‘They never paid her no mind!”

  “Daddy, somebody’s got to carry the coffin.”

  “You’ll do it! You girls! The thought calmed him. “You’ll carry your mother.” We exchanged glances. A lead casket? The five of us plus Betty—the six of us carry a lead casket? Riding over our hesitation, Daddy insisted heedlessly, “Women can do anything.”

  “If that’s what you want, Daddy..”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Then we’ll do it.”

  The funeral director raised his eyebrows but went on to his next item. “Who will lead the service? What’s your minister’s name?”

  “No minister,” ordered Daddy, and again he looked to us. “My girls’ll take care of the service.”

  We wrote the eulogy that evening, all of us sitting at the round table, reliving the story of Mommy coming from West Virginia to New York, meeting Daddy at the Savoy Ballroom, having a baby alone when Daddy went off to the Navy, raising us, helping Daddy build the house, overseeing our music lessons, making our clothes, playing in the band, and always, always insisting we study, and not only study but get A’s. We titled her story, “A Suitcase Full of Dreams” because that is what Mommy came North with, and like so many other impoverished immigrants in a new world, she had made her dreams come true—but not for herself, for her children.

  At the service, Jeanette read the eulogy, and after the eulogy I sang “Ave Maria,” fighting off tears because there before me, in the open casket, lay Mommy, so lifelike but never to be alive again.

  The date on which she was born was the date on which we buried her—January 12. She hadn’t liked her birthday because she claimed that it always snowed on that date, and, true to form, at the cemetery a blanket of new sleet was on the ground and the wind swirled icy sharp crystals in our faces as we gathered at the back of the hearse to take our places, three on each side of the casket. The grave site was under a tree at the top of a hill. Could we carry the casket uphill through the snow without losing our footing and having it crash to the ground?

  “Women can do anything,” we whispered to reassure ourselves as we formed a circle to carry out our old ritual. We stacked our hands without touching, concentrated, broke away, and grasped the rails of the casket. The box was as heavy as our worst imaginings, but years of lifting amplifiers in and out of the car had so strengthened our arms, shoulders, and backs that, with Donna, Jeanette, and Betty on one side and Linda, Rita, and me on the other, we were able to go with measured steps up the hill to deliver Mommy to her final resting place. Only once did someone lose her footing. The rest of us braced ourselves; the slipping one steadied, and we went on. After we set the casket down at the graveside, we ranged ourselves around Daddy at the head of the grave and sang “The Lord’s Prayer.” And then it was over.

  On the way home we drove in silence, mourning Mommy. We were almost back at the house before anyone spoke, and then it was to remark solemnly, “Gee, Daddy, you’ve got to go on a diet if you expect us to carry your butt up that hill.”

  It took us so by surprise that we started to laugh. And we laughed and laughed, Daddy more than anyone. It was the release we needed.

  But the laughter was short-lived for Daddy. After we had all scattered again, he was miserably lonely, able to say little else when we called on the telephone but, “Oh, your mother’s gone, oh, oh.” Rita, in dental school in Philadelphia, became virtually a surrogate wife to him, traveling back and forth to cook his dinner, massage his feet, which were bothering him because of poor circulation due to his recently discovered diabetes, and just generally to be there to assuage his loneliness. It was a hard time for her as well as for Daddy, and none of the rest of us, except for Betty
, was able to be of much help. The Army transferred Linda to Germany, and after that to Korea. Donna had her husband and small child to look after. As chief resident, my time was not my own. And Jeanette was not only in practice as a counseling psychologist but, bored with administering to tests and stung by having been put down as “not a real doctor” at the time of Mommy’s illness, she had decided to go to medical school and was making up the courses she needed to meet the entrance requirements. Jeanette was thirty-two years old by the time she started medical school at Boston University, which made Daddy snort that if she had listened to him in the first place she wouldn’t have wasted ten years.

  “All those detours. Running on empty. Wasting time you can’t never get back.”

  “I know, Daddy,” Jeanette agreed. “But I couldn’t let you tell me what to do. I had to find myself.”

  “You could’ve found yourself a whole lot quicker goin’ in a straight line.”

  He was easier on Rita than he was on Jeanette because he had counted so confidently on “Doc” to make it, to prove his point that his daughters could become doctors, that he was more cynical than pleased by this late decision of Jeanette’s. As much as the decision vindicated him, it did not go far to repair the devastation he had experienced when she let him down originally. On the other hand, when Rita now decided to drop out of the University of Pennsylvania as she had dropped out of New York University, this elicited only an ordinary amount of disapproval and displeasure from Daddy. He ranted against her for not getting the job done but was inclined to excuse her because she was the youngest and had not had as long and as intensive an exposure to his teachings as we older ones. Having gone through Monmouth College in three years, it was patent that Rita was at least as bright, if not more so, as any of us, but she too was having trouble finding herself, and after two tries at dental school and one at medical school at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, she opted for a job teaching science at a private school. Of the five of us, Jeanette and Rita were the most independent and individual, while Linda and I were plodders and followers, but, as so famously happened in the story of the tortoise and the hare, we tortoises had plugged away and crossed the finish line first.

  I was twenty-nine years old when Mommy died, and Shearwood and I had been married for three years. Concerning children, Mommy had said, not once but many times, “Your life as you know it is ended when you have kids, so do everything you want to do before you let yourself become pregnant. When it gets to the point where you can say, 'If God took me away right now, I’ve done most of everything I want to do', that’s when it’s okay to have kids.” At twenty-nine, I was an M.D., the obstetrician I had wanted to be since I was eight years old, and I would be completing my residency in a few months. I decided it was okay now to have a child. Shearwood agreed.

  But I couldn’t seem to get pregnant. Shearwood’s younger brother, Ricky, married a month before we were in 1974, had a daughter born in 1976. Elaine, Ricky’s wife, taunted me on the telephone from Gary, Indiana. “Oh, you intelligent women, you study all your eggs away.” That was silly, but when she sneered, “Well, you wanted to be a doctor,” implying that if I wasn’t willing to stay home and be a traditional wife to my husband, not being able to get pregnant was the consequence, I began to wonder if she was right. It got so I cried every month and every time I delivered a baby.

  Shearwood, always the quiet voice of reason, scouted my fears. “You’re a resident. I’m a resident. You’re on-call every other night. I’m on-call every other night. When do we have time? Don’t worry about it.” I finished my residency and left the hectic world of the hospital to return to Columbia and enter the calmer world of research as a Fellow in maternal-fetal medicine. The very next month I became pregnant. Shearwood said, “See, I told you that as soon as you relaxed, it would happen.”

  For more than four years I had watched over, cared for, studied, and delivered pregnant women. But studying pregnancy and being pregnant are two entirely different matters, I discovered. I had genuinely sympathized with my patients’ morning sickness and their aches and pains, but now I shared them. I realized that how you view yourself and how others view you drastically changes when you’re pregnant. All your hopes, fears, and emotions seem to be distilled down to a single thought: I hope my baby is all right. Your concerns are about someone you’ve never even met. The bonding process has begun.

  One day when I was about five months pregnant, I thought I felt the baby move. This was what I’d been waiting for, the moment all my patients spoke about reverently. Slowly, I lay down on the couch in our apartment, barely breathing so as not to confuse any other natural occurrence with the baby’s movement. Sure enough, I felt it! It wasn’t a kick as I had expected and as my patients and the textbooks described it. It was more like holding a fluttering butterfly in my cupped hands. It was an ecstatic experience. I felt life. I felt my baby. I couldn’t wait to share it with Shearwood.

  “Guess what!” I said as he came through the door that evening. “I think I felt the baby move!” He looked down at me, pondered for a moment, and in a measured clinical tone asked, “Are you sure it’s not gas?”

  I was crushed. How could he be so unemotional about the most exciting happening in my life? I realized then what a chasm there can be between men and women. Men are at a distance from an experience central to a woman’s existence.

  As a medical student, resident, and now a Fellow, I had witnessed time and again what we referred to as the hospital jinx: a doctor, doctor’s wife, or a nurse—someone closely connected with the hospital—came in for a simple procedure and ended up with a totally unexpected, life-threatening complication. Determined that this was not going to happen to me, I opted to go for Lamaze training so that I’d be able to get through labor without drugs or anesthesia. Shearwood balked at accompanying me, fearing he’d feel awkward and out of place, but I insisted and he quickly became a convert to the method. After six weeks of training, in the breathing exercises for me and as coach for him, we were as fine-tuned as soldiers ready for battle.

  Time went by. And went by. I was one week, two weeks, three weeks overdue. The stretch marks on my tummy proliferated like cracks on a desert floor. Daddy called and joked, “Listen, turn the Pampers over to me. I can use them to polish my car.” I stopped answering the phone because I didn’t want to hear one more person sound incredulous over the fact that I hadn’t delivered yet.

  One Tuesday evening I was watching the popular television show, “Sha Na Na" and had just polished off a giant Blimpie submarine—over Shearwood’s objections—when the pain struck. At first, I thought it was indigestion in just retribution for the sandwich, but the pain kept coming on and coming on, as unrelenting as a runaway locomotive. Soon it felt like a stun gun of fifty thousand volts being applied to my body every ten minutes, then eight minutes, then five minutes.

  By six o’clock the next morning I was exhausted, having sat up through the night, all the while puffing in 4/4 time to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” in proper Lamaze style. I threw a shoe at Shearwood to wake him because the pains were so bad I couldn’t get up from the chair. I asked him to call Dr. Bowe, my obstetrician. He said, “Why don’t we wait, honey, until I can time the contractions so I can tell Dr. Bowe the precise intervals between them.” I hurled the other shoe and threatened him with decapitation if he didn’t call instantly.

  It was my professional opinion that dilation must have progressed to at least six or seven centimeters out of a possible ten because of the amount of pain I had endured over the last twelve hours. Alas, upon arrival at the hospital, I proved to be at three centimeters. I couldn’t believe it. Only three. I felt like the victim of a cruel joke.

  Throughout the day, although it scarcely seemed possible, the contractions became even more intense. At one point, I decided I was having an out-of-body experience as I retreated to a corner of the room and watched this woman lying in bed being tortured every two or three minutes. Dr. Bowe
held my hand and kept saying, “Roll with it, Yvonne.” Shearwood did everything he could to support and encourage me. I was in agony, and still, not wanting anything to go wrong, I held out against epidural anesthesia, although I finally asked for and was given a small amount of Demerol.

  At six o’clock that night, Dr. Bowe pronounced me fully dilated and gave me permission to push. From that point on, it usually takes another hour for delivery of a first baby, but I told Dr. Bowe not to go away, that I intended to get this over with. At 6:22 P.M. the baby was born. Without complications.

  A boy, weighing in at 8 pounds, 15 ounces, and except for his little cone-shaped head because of all that labor, the most precious small creature I had ever seen. We named him Shearwood McClelland III, after his father and grandfather, and promptly called him Woody.

  With the ordeal over, I luxuriated in the care and attention I received because I was a Fellow at the hospital. I had a large room with a spectacular view of the Hudson all to myself in the Harkness Pavilion, the wing for private patients in the same Presbyterian Hospital where I had been born. I was not unaware of the irony that thirty years earlier Mommy had been in a multibed ward while here was I in royal accommodations. But Mommy would have been the first to revel in the contrast, taking it as proof of how far and fast it is possible to rise in the world if you have the wit to value education. My only regret was that she wasn’t there to look down at her first grandson as he lay in my arms, to take hold of his tiny fists and kiss him gently to welcome him into the world.

  I took it for granted that Daddy would show up at the hospital as soon as he heard the news, pleased, proud, and excited that at last there was a boy in the family. He didn’t come the next day or any other day. He merely said over the phone, “Are you okay? Is the baby okay? Fine.” And on the rare occasions after that when he came to the apartment to visit, he treated Woody in the same casually affectionate fashion he responded to neighborhood kids in Long Branch. He would pick him up and bounce him on his knee, but that was just because he loved kids, not because of any special grandfatherly interest or attachment. He never brought Woody a toy or a gift, never in the years after that sent him a birthday card.