A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald

by Natasha Lester

  ‘I’m Evie,’ she said. ‘I’ll help until the ambulance arrives.’

  ‘It’s the doctor lady I told you about, Mum,’ said the girl who had banged on the door in the middle of Evie’s dreams.

  ‘Damn ambulance … Arrrrgh!’ Another scream burst from the woman’s mouth. When the contractions stopped, she lay still as if she had no more strength left.

  ‘What’s your mother’s name?’ Evie asked the girl.

  ‘Gladys. But everyone calls her Glad.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Patty.’

  ‘Lil,’ Evie said, ‘can you sit behind Glad so she can lean against you? She needs to be more upright.’

  Lil nodded, climbed onto the bed and wriggled herself in behind Glad.

  ‘Find the cleanest towel or blanket to wrap the baby in when it comes. And get everyone else out of here,’ Evie said to Patty, gesturing to the onlookers at the door. She was anxious to rid the room of extra people in case everything went to hell.

  Evie took out her stethoscope and listened to Glad’s stomach. This part was easy. She knew how to find a heartbeat. She had the mother in a better position. She made herself smile as she listened, because she needed Glad to have faith in her, even if Evie had no confidence in herself. ‘Excellent. Beautiful strong heartbeat. Baby’s not tired yet, but let’s get it out as soon as we can. I’ll examine you now.’

  Again, this part was simple; Evie had conducted lots of examinations. She found what Glad had suspected, that the baby was breech. She could see that Glad was more tired than it was possible to imagine, her body already having climbed a mountain, only to find another mountain to climb on the other side. What Glad needed was someone who could soothe her and keep her pushing until the baby came out.

  Evie forced herself to speak calmly. ‘Your baby is bottom first. That’s why it’s taking so long. But a baby’s bottom is the same size as its head, so it still fits perfectly in the birth canal.’

  ‘You’d better be right,’ said Glad before she let out another howl.

  I know, thought Evie. She’d seen only one breech birth, and that from her usual position against the wall in the delivery suite, peering between Dr Kingsley’s arm and his torso, so that her entire visual experience of the birth had been cylindrical, as if she’d watched everything through a rolled-up newspaper. But she remembered her lecture notes as clearly as if she’d just written them: she had to birth the hips by lateral flexion, and then the shoulders and the head would follow. She prayed to whoever it was that heard wishes flung into a New York night that the head wouldn’t get stuck and the baby wouldn’t asphyxiate. Or that the ambulance would come.

  This was the chance Evie had wanted. To be allowed to help a woman give birth. And now she wished to be anywhere else. Because what if she did something wrong? She’d seen mothers die and babies die, and mothers forever ruined by birth, and she’d thought she’d be able to do better than those other doctors. But what if she couldn’t?

  She looked at Lil. And Patty. They were staring at her as if they trusted her. Evie remembered Rose, and she knew that, this time, she wouldn’t walk away.

  ‘Glad, you need to give a big push when I tell you to,’ she said. ‘Then as soon as the baby’s bottom is out, I’m going to need you to push again, as hard as you can, because we need to get the baby’s shoulders and head out straight after. Does that make sense?’

  A nod from Glad.

  ‘Here comes another contraction,’ said Evie. ‘Push, Glad. And Lil, keep holding her up as much as you can. We need gravity to help us.’

  Please let this work, Evie prayed again. It’s not this woman’s fault that I’m all she has.

  In spite of her exhaustion, Glad pushed hard, grunting with the strain. Evie began to guide the baby’s bottom out. Glad was doing her job. Evie needed to do hers.

  ‘Two more big pushes,’ Evie said.

  The buttocks turned slightly. Evie said a silent thank you. ‘I need that towel, Patty!’ she shouted, and the towel appeared, with only one brownish stain, which she ignored.

  Evie wrapped the baby’s hips to keep it warm and to give her something less slippery to hold than vernix-covered skin. She gently manoeuvred the baby towards Glad’s sacrum and the anterior shoulder came free. Then she lifted the baby’s buttocks up into the air to help the posterior shoulder move out. Just the head to go. The most difficult part.

  If Evie didn’t control the birth of the head, there could be a disastrous change in the pressure on the infant’s brain, resulting in a haemorrhage. Or … Evie stopped herself. Listing the potential complications wasn’t going to help. Her teeth were drawing blood from the insides of her cheeks. She grasped the baby by the ankles with one hand and began to pull with some force, but not so much that the neck would bend backwards and break, or so she hoped. She raised the baby’s feet straight up into the air and placed one hand against Glad’s perineum so that the head didn’t come out too quickly. Finally she saw what she wanted to see. A mouth and a nose. And then the slow and steady appearance of the baby’s head. Suddenly there it was. There she was.

  A baby girl. Intact and perfect and howling like the wind down Bleecker on a winter’s day, a sound Evie was so glad to hear.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she announced. She realised she had tears in her eyes and that she felt as proud as if she’d been the baby’s mother.

  Lil propped Glad against a pillow, slithered off the bed to take a look, and began to squeal and applaud. Glad reached out her hands and held her daughter.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ sniffed Evie.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ said Lil, giving her friend a hug.

  Evie laughed as she watched Glad kissing her daughter’s forehead. Glad was pale and tired but awake and elated. It was a birth that had needed only skill and a shared understanding between the mother and the doctor. Mother and baby were alive, well and in love.

  Then she leaned back suddenly against the wall. Her legs were shaking. For the first time, she realised how afraid she’d been. Not just tonight, but all through her studies. Afraid that being ignored, being made to watch rather than assist, never having a chance to practise, would make her a doctor with excellent grades but no skill. Sure, she could fix up most of the gynae cases that the Ziegfeld Girls presented her with. But she’d had no proof that she could deliver a baby. Until now.

  Evie remembered Thomas’s smile from earlier that night. As she thought of him, and about what she’d just done, she knew that this was why she’d come to New York. To feel as if she mattered. As if she was, finally, full of life.

  When Evie left the boarding house later that morning, still soaring from the glorious adventure of the night before, she wasn’t expecting to hear a voice as familiar as her own.

  ‘Evelyn?’

  The only people who called her that were her mother and father. And Evie was astonished to see that her mother had ventured across the frontier of Broadway and was now standing on the sidewalk outside Evie’s boarding house.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ Mrs Lockhart said. She clutched her purse in front of her, looking quaint and out of place among the melting pot of Greenwich Village’s inhabitants.

  ‘Well, I wanted to talk to you two years ago, but you didn’t write back,’ Evie retorted. She began to stride off to catch the El but then relented and turned back. After all, it was her mother. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Seeing you last night was a surprise.’

  ‘You can blame Charles for that. Let’s get coffee,’ Evie said, leading the way to Bleecker Street. She pushed open the door of the cheapest coffee house on the block, where yesterday’s crumbs and a lifetime of sticky marks came for free with your order, and sat down at a small corner table.

  Mrs Lockhart hovered by the table, as if unsure what to do.

  ‘Two coffees,’ Evie called to the waitress. ‘Take a seat. I’ll get it,’ she said to her mother. ‘I seem to remember I owe Father some money. I only have five minutes or I’ll be
late for college.’

  Her mother sat down gingerly. ‘How have you been passing the time here?’

  Evie burst out laughing. ‘You want me to fill in nearly three years in five minutes? I’ve been studying and working. That’s about it. And you?’

  ‘We visit Viola and Charles occasionally.’

  ‘Now you know where I live, you can visit me too.’ Evie looked her mother in the eye, this person with whom she’d lived for twenty years of her life, but who’d been happy to disclaim her. How could a parent do that? Did their estrangement hurt her mother at all, the way it hurt Evie? Or did her mother truly believe that she had only one daughter now?

  The coffees arrived. Evie took hers gladly, tiredness crashing over her at last.

  Mrs Lockhart waited for the waitress to leave. ‘And what else do you do?’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time for anything else.’

  ‘But you must do something besides study.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Does anyone visit you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Her mother sipped her coffee and then stared at the cup as she spoke. ‘Your father. Does he come to visit you?’

  ‘Last night was the first time I’d seen him since I left the Whitmans’.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother seemed disappointed by Evie’s answer.

  ‘Had you asked him to visit me?’ Evie said, trying to grasp her mother’s meaning, her heart leaping a little at this first inkling of maternal concern.

  ‘No.’ Her mother shook her head and Evie’s heart dropped back to the ground. Of course her mother hadn’t sent her father along to New York to enquire after her.

  She stood up. ‘I’m going to be late.’ She left some money on the table to pay for the coffees.

  But before Evie could leave, her mother put her hand on her arm. ‘He’s been to New York once or twice to stay with Charles and Viola. He didn’t take me with him.’

  Evie was silent. The thought of her father voluntarily spending time in the Gomorrah of New York City was incongruous. And then there was the fact that he hadn’t bothered, on any of those visits, to see Evie.

  Mrs Lockhart looked down at her coffee cup. ‘It’s so quiet when I’m at the house by myself.’

  Evie shut her eyes. She didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to imagine her mother alone in the house in Concord, perfecting her already flawless embroidery, surrounded by the silence she’d always wished for. She remembered the conversation she’d had with her father when he’d refused to pay her college fees and she’d suddenly understood that he might also find his Concord life dull and confining. Did he come to New York to escape the gentlemanly responsibilities he’d taken up like a manacle, chaining him to the proprieties of the upper-middle class? But how could she say that to her mother? Evie opened her eyes. In spite of her own sadness, she tried to comfort her mother. ‘Perhaps he came for some sort of business and didn’t want you to be bored.’

  ‘Of course you’re right.’ Her mother affixed a familiar smile to her face, a smile Evie used to think of as cold; now she wondered if it was the mask her mother wore to hide her own hurts.

  ‘I could start writing to you again?’ Evie said.

  Mrs Lockhart nodded but Evie wasn’t sure she’d heard. She left the coffee shop more confused than when she’d entered, wondering why her mother had sought her out after all this time. Was this just a momentary peek at her mother’s heart, one that Mrs Lockhart would never wish to put down on a sheet of notepaper in a letter to her daughter? And even after this encounter, if Evie wrote to her, would her mother be venture-some enough to write back?

  ‘Better get your glad rags on, your sugar daddy’s here,’ Bea said to Evie that night, giving her a not-so-subtle elbow in the ribs.

  Given the giggles of the girls, Evie knew a man must be coming through the dressing room, walking between the rows of performers who were changing out of their costumes, taking off their faces and dressing down from sequins to silk dresses.

  ‘He sure must be somebody if Bob lets him come back here rather than making him wait at the stage door with all the wannabes,’ added Bea.

  ‘Swell,’ Evie muttered, expecting it was Charles, come to wield his power like a dog with its leg cocked, but realising – just in time to remove the snarl from her lip – that it was Thomas.

  ‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this,’ she said, indicating her leotard and headdress in the mirror. She was stupidly gratified when he blushed. Most of the men she’d met at Ziegfeld’s were too suave to blush at anything. She turned to face him. ‘You know, outside the Follies I’m a regular girl,’ she said, hoping to put him at his ease.

  ‘You’ll never be a regular girl, Evie,’ said Thomas.

  Now it was her turn to blush. She looked at Thomas in his beautifully cut dinner suit and the smile on his lips that was all for her and she thought what a fine-looking man he was. So fine that the sight of him commanded all her attention and she didn’t even notice Bea raising her eyebrows suggestively.

  ‘Would you like to get a drink?’ he asked. ‘I know it’s late but we could go somewhere nearby.’

  ‘I delivered an unforeseen baby last night and I’m so tired that if I have even one drink I’ll be scrooched.’ She saw the corners of Thomas’s mouth dip with disappointment and added hastily, ‘But we could do something else?’

  He thought. ‘The pictures?’

  ‘Love to. Let me get changed and I’ll meet you at the stage door. Don’t let the crowds put you off.’

  ‘Crowds?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ There weren’t words enough to explain the chaos surrounding one of the most famous stage doors on Broadway.

  When he’d gone, Evie quickly pulled her clothes out of her bag. ‘Damn. I’ve been wearing these at the clinic all day. They look …’

  ‘Like a line of hoofers has trampled them.’ Bea stood up on her chair, stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled for quiet. ‘Girls! Evie’s got herself a date with a fella who’s gen-uinely the gnat’s whistle and she ain’t got nothing fit to wear. Whaddya got?’

  The effect of Queen Bea’s whistle and holler was as powerful as if Flo himself had said, Thou shalt find Evie something to wear. The girls mobilised. The idea that there was at least one man in the world who was the gnat’s whistle, and that this man wanted to date, rather than merely deflower, a Ziegfeld Girl was enough. Because if it happened to one girl, it might happen to any of them. Maybe there was a way out of shimmy-shaking for cash.

  Bags were searched and outfits laid out in various combinations, some of which said gun moll, while others screamed, Hang the cheque, it’s cash all the way. Evie eventually decided on a divine sailor-style dress in navy linen with white contrast trims. It had a prim little bow at the collar, fell to just below Evie’s knees and made her look as if she’d stepped off a yacht on the French Riviera.

  There was a sense of occasion to Evie’s plans now. Her tiredness was abandoned, to be taken up later, whenever there was time. A new pair of silk stockings was discovered in someone’s bag, a pair of cream heels – fortunately in Evie’s size – with cunning pearl buttons was declared a perfect match, and red lipstick was absolutely insisted upon by all the girls as the ideal finishing touch. Her hair was brushed till it shone and her dress smoothed down. She gave a final twirl, was pronounced ready, and set off for the stage door accompanied by a wistful chorus of good lucks.

  Good luck? Evie wondered as she pushed open the door. What exactly was she hoping might happen? Truthfully, she’d settle for another of Thomas’s smiles. A girl could re-live a thousand dreams with one of those tucked safe in her memory.

  Evie ignored the queue of men at the door and went straight to Thomas. He was standing a long way back, looking uncertain, and Evie realised how long it had taken her to dress. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My clothes had the distinct smell of the hospital about them and I had to scrounge around for something less pungent to wear.’

&n
bsp; ‘Should I call you Captain?’ Thomas said teasingly, nodding at her sailor dress.

  ‘Only if you don’t want to walk the plank.’

  And then and there, Evie got what she wanted. Another smile from Thomas. She stopped him as he put out his arm to hail a cab. ‘Let’s take the El,’ she said. ‘Evie’s tour of Manhattan continues.’

  ‘Lead the way.’

  Once on board the train, Evie showed Thomas the things she saw every day and every night as her train snaked through Manhattan, things she was sure Thomas had never seen before. The train curved a few feet away from office buildings and apartments, giving the passengers a view inside the places people lived and worked that was like no other. ‘This is my favourite part,’ she said as the train rattled past the second-floor windows of Macy’s at Thirty-Fourth Street.

  ‘For window shopping?’ Thomas asked, and Evie laughed.

  ‘No. Because no matter how late it is, there’s always someone in there. See.’ Evie pointed, but Thomas shook his head as the train sped by too quickly for him to see. ‘It’s the same guy every night,’ she said. ‘I suppose he’s working, checking the stock, making things ready for the morning. But sometimes he looks like he’s dreaming, staring at the clothes or shoes or haberdashery and thinking of all the things he could do and be in that pair of two-tone brogues, and wearing those maroon pinstriped trousers, and with cerulean bedsheets instead of plain old white.’ She grinned. ‘Of course, he’s probably sleepwalking or something else much less romantic.’

  ‘I like your story better.’

  ‘Me too.’ The train drew into the station. ‘We’d better hurry or we’ll miss the last session,’ Evie said as they stepped off.

  Thomas began to run, surprising her with the suddenness of his movement. ‘Keep up, Captain,’ he called.

  ‘I will!’ she shouted back, and they ran on together, arriving at the cavernous Sheridan Theatre on Twelfth Street just in time. Every seat in the house was filled at every session, such was the appetite of New Yorkers for sheikhs, swashbucklers, phantoms and other dashing unrealities. The lights were about to dim, the piano had struck up its accompaniment, and Evie and Thomas were both flushed, out of breath and laughing as they were ushered to seats near the back. They earned themselves at least one reproving stare, from a man who evidently preferred his movies silent and unstirred.