The Amish Midwife

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Ada,” she said again. “Make us some tea, please.” She was in much better shape than I had feared based on Klara’s comments.

  I pulled up a chair while Ada busied herself in the kitchen. There wasn’t much time for small talk, but I couldn’t just jump in with all of my questions. I started by saying that Mama and Dad had told me a little about her through the years, that according to them my birth grandmother was tall and kind and that she loved me. Listening to my words, Mammi’s eyes welled with tears, and one after another they spilled over and trickled down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away.

  “I have come here now because I have questions,” I said softly, pulling a tissue from the box on the table and handing it to her.

  Mammi nodded, dabbing at her wet cheeks, obviously trying to pull herself together.

  “It seems Giselle is my birth mother?”

  Startled, Mammi glanced toward the kitchen before answering.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Where does she live?”

  Mammi shook her head.

  “You don’t want to tell me?”

  She nodded.

  Feeling crushed, I asked, “How about my birth father?” She didn’t respond, so I added in an even softer voice, “I’ve been wondering if it’s Alexander.”

  Though she didn’t seem surprised by the question, she shook her head emphatically, saying no, it was definitely not Alexander.

  “Who, then?”

  Mammi touched her lips with her fingertips, glancing again toward the kitchen. I sat back in the chair, my eyes still on her, wondering how badly she’d been affected by the stroke. Her mind seemed clear.

  “What does it matter now anyway?” she added. Before I could answer, she continued, finding her voice. “All that really matters is that you came back. I always knew you would, or at least I hoped you would. Someday.” She lifted up a hand as if to touch my face.

  I hesitated, knowing I had come here for words, not actions. Still, there was something about her expression, about the way she was reaching toward me, that pushed all other thoughts from my mind, at least for the moment. Swallowing hard, I leaned forward, allowing her fingertips to move lightly along my cheek. Though her touch was tentative, my heart pounded as if she were sending an electric jolt through my skin. I closed my eyes, all of the babies, mothers, and grandmothers I had ever worked with suddenly filling my mind. They were family to each other, connected by blood and tissue and sinew, just as this woman was connected to me. Time froze as I reveled in that knowledge.

  When her feathery touch ceased, I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, feeling suddenly cut adrift. I was relieved to see that though the old woman had returned her hand to her lap, she continued to study my face, to take it in hungrily.

  “Meine Enkelin,” she whispered tenderly, the words striking some memory deep inside of me and causing hot tears to spring to my eyes. “So beautiful. All grown up now.” Even as she smiled with her lips, her eyes filled again with tears as well.

  She accepted my offer of another tissue, and though I managed to recover quickly, she was still crying when Ada stepped into the room a few moments later, rattling a pillbox in her hands.

  “Looks like Mamm forgot to give you your medication,” Ada said, giving the box another shake before coming to a stop, her smile fading when she saw her grandmother’s tears. “What’s the matter, Mammi?” She asked, bending down beside the chair.

  “Just the past,” the old woman said, sniffling.

  “Well, that’s why you take these pills. Right?”

  A small sob caught in Mammi’s throat.

  Not wanting to cry again myself, I offered to retrieve a glass of water. I stood and headed to the kitchen, taking deep breaths as I went. When my emotions were once again under control, I returned with glass in hand and told Ada to go ahead and finish making the tea, that I could handle things in here.

  “Thanks,” she replied, handing me the pillbox and giving her grandmother’s arm a pat.

  As she returned to the kitchen, I sat down, popping open the lid on the section of the pillbox that had been labeled for Wednesday mornings. Inside were five pills. I recognized a blood thinner and high blood pressure medicine. The other three were the same—all tranquilizers—and a dosage that was way too high. For a moment I considered palming two of the pills instead of giving them to her, but I decided it wasn’t my place to alter her meds even if I did have her best interests in mind. I gave her the pills and then the glass of water, thinking it was better that I have a talk with Ada and explain my concerns directly. She would just need to think of a way to convey that information to Klara without getting herself in trouble for having let me in here.

  I could tell from the sounds coming from the kitchen that the tea was almost ready, so I called out to Ada, telling her not to bother with a cup for me because my time was almost up.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she called back. “But you’re probably right.”

  While she was still out of the room I took Mammi’s hand in mine and told her I had to leave now but that I would come back again soon.

  “Yes, please,” she replied, her eyelids already beginning to droop from the medication.

  “Until then,” I whispered, giving her hand a squeeze as I stood, “I want you to think about my questions. I want answers. I need information.”

  Despite her encroaching drug haze, Mammi held on to me tightly, even after I tried to let go. Then she surprised me by grabbing my wrist with her other hand and pulling me toward her, obviously wanting me to come closer, much closer. I leaned down, expecting a kiss to my cheek. Instead, she put her lips to my ear.

  “Burke Bauer,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Burke Bauer,” she repeated, slurring this time.

  Then her hands relaxed, releasing me. By the time I pulled back far enough to see her face, I realized that her eyes were closed, her jaw slack. As Ada stepped into the room carrying the teapot and two cups on a tray, Mammi let out a loud snore.

  “So much for the tea,” Ada said, her steps faltering. “She will probably be conked out for hours.”

  “That’s because she’s overmedicated,” I said, running a hand through my hair and trying to recover from the shock of the woman’s words. Had that been the drugs talking? Or had she just whispered in my ear the name I had been seeking, that of my birth father?

  “What do you mean?” Ada asked, setting the tray down on a nearby table.

  “I mean, she’s getting three times the amount of tranquilizers she should be getting,” I explained, hoping that Ada wouldn’t notice the array of emotions that were swirling around inside of me. “In fact, she really shouldn’t be on tranquilizers at all. There are better medications for stroke victims than that.” I went on to explain that besides being addictive, they weren’t long lasting.

  “But she cries all the time if she doesn’t have it.”

  Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to focus on the matter at hand.

  “Then she probably needs an antidepressant. The tranquilizers are just making her sleepy, not to mention affecting her balance. In my opinion, her doctor shouldn’t be prescribing it at all.”

  “I’ll tell Mamm,” Ada said. “Perhaps I can say I read an article or overheard a conversation or something.”

  I reached the door and hesitated, my hand on the knob, knowing there was one more matter she and I needed to discuss, one I could only approach head-on.

  “I was thinking you and I should have a DNA test,” I said to Ada, glancing toward Mammi to make sure she was still asleep. Regardless of what the old woman had just told me, there was still a chance that Alexander was my father. If Ada and I got tested, I could find out for sure.

  Ada took a step backward. “Why?”

  “To see exactly how we’re related. It’s no big deal, just a swab of the inside of your cheek.” I was pretty sure I could find someone at the hospital to do it, or if not I could buy a test.r />
  “DNA is the genetic code, right?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think we would find out?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Or maybe we’ll learn exactly how we connect, why we look so much alike. Whatever it would or wouldn’t tell us, it would mean a lot to me.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I will think about it.” Glancing toward her sleeping grandmother, Ada motioned for me to step outside. Together, we moved onto the porch, and after pulling the door shut behind her, Ada produced a cell phone from her pocket, flashing me a sheepish grin. “I can text you later, once I decide. What is your number?”

  I rattled it off and then smiled, surprised but not shocked that Ada had a cell phone. After all, she hadn’t joined the church yet. Though I didn’t totally understand the rules regarding Amish cell phone usage, it seemed to me that they had a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” cell policy, at least with their as-yet-unbaptized youth.

  She gave me her number as well, and I quickly entered it in my contacts, thrilled to be able to communicate with her without having to come out to the house to do so.

  “It might take me a while, though,” she said, “to make my decision.”

  “How long?” I couldn’t contain my frustration.

  She shrugged and a pixielike smile crossed her face. “I need to think on it.”

  My prenatal appointments ended at the same time Zed and Ella trudged up the drive, coming from the bus stop a quarter mile up the road. Ella was texting away as she walked through the door, and she kept on going straight up to her room. In a few minutes, when I stood halfway up the stairs, I could hear her talking on the phone.

  Marta had left a note on the table saying that she’d gone into town. I assumed to talk to her lawyer.

  I could take my laptop into town or recruit Zed into helping me again. He seemed to have better luck with online searches than I did and wasn’t likely to share those searches with anyone else, one of the perks of recruiting an adolescent boy who hardly spoke.

  I gave him the name Burke Bauer and said that the man probably lived in Lancaster County during the 1980s, maybe near where his Aunt Klara lived now. I was pretty sure there could be a slew of men with the same name and knew the chances of finding the right Burke Bauer were pretty low. And Mammi hadn’t said that he was my father, but I didn’t know why else she would have told me his name. Maybe, just maybe, it was true that my grandmother loved me. I clasped my right hand with my left, remembering her tender touch, and ducked out of the dining room, fighting back tears. Yes, I thought she loved me. Even still.

  I collapsed onto the sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, blinking tears away. Ella’s door opened and closed. She started down the stairs, but her cell rang again and she turned around. A moment later her door opened and closed again.

  Zed spoke from his perch at the computer across the room. “Lexie, I have something.”

  I jumped to my feet. The kid was amazing.

  “How about this?”

  I looked over his shoulder. It was an obituary for a Burke F. Bauer II, who died at age forty-eight more than ten years ago. A prominent businessman in Lancaster County, he had run his family’s nursery stock business for many years. Bauer was survived by his wife Lavonne and one son, B.F Bauer III.

  I did the math. If the guy in the obituary was my father, he would have been more than thirty when I was born, which was too old to have been fooling around with a nineteen-year-old girl. The more likely culprit was his son, apparently also named Burke Bauer. I told Zed to see what he could come up with for that one, but after a good ten minutes of clicking around, Zed had managed to find only one thing, a brief newspaper article in a local paper about him winning the science fair in the spring of his senior year in high school. At least that information gave us his age relative to that date, so again I did the math but realized he would have been only eleven years old when I was born. That made him an even less likely paternity suspect than his father.

  “What about the widow?” I asked. “Can you find anything at all on Lavonne Bauer? Is she still alive?”

  In less than a minute, Zed came up with an address for a Lavonne Bauer near Paradise in Lancaster County. He also tried to find an address for the son, but nothing came up.

  “Who are these people?” Zed asked after he printed out Lavonne’s address and handed it to me.

  “I’m hoping she’s wrong,” I replied, “but according to Mammi, my biological father’s name is Burke Bauer. At least that’s what I think she was telling me. So either she was talking about a different Burke Bauer altogether, or back when my mother was nineteen she had an affair with a thirty-two-year-old married man who got her pregnant. That’s…shocking.” I stopped, realizing this subject material wasn’t the best for a conversation with a twelve-year-old.

  “An older guy with a younger babe?” Zed replied. “That’s not shocking. That’s not even all that unusual, at least not on TV.”

  I sighed.

  “Seriously,” Zed protested. “I mean, isn’t that one of the signs of a midlife crisis?”

  I looked at his earnest face and couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What are you watching, Zed? Oprah? The View?” If he was, it was online or at a friend’s house because Marta didn’t have a TV.

  He blushed as he replied, “Well, come on. You know. Older man, younger woman, midlife crisis. End of story.”

  Though thirty-two wasn’t exactly midlife, Zed had a point. Older man, younger woman, end of story. But was it my story? Had I really been the product of an extramarital affair? If so, I had to wonder how it could have happened, how a young Amish girl and a mature married man could have even met, much less ended up in a clandestine relationship. However it had begun, I couldn’t imagine its progression either, especially regarding the pregnancy. Had Giselle been foolish, perhaps even gotten pregnant on purpose in the hope that Burke would leave his wife for her? Maybe once he learned of Giselle’s pregnancy, he had rejected her, even tried to pay her off and send her on her way. Whatever the details, if I had the correct Burke Bauer, as I suspected I did, somehow I knew there was much more to the story than I would ever be able to learn from a simple Internet search.

  At least this new evidence might help answer my most important question, which was why I had been given up for adoption at all. Obviously, a married man who already had a legitimate child of his own wouldn’t have wanted me—or even been willing to acknowledge me. Perhaps Giselle’s heartache was so great from his rejection that she decided that she hadn’t wanted me either. But if that was the case, then surely one of her sisters could have taken me in, or even Mammi herself, and raised me. So why hadn’t they? Before today I couldn’t begin to fathom the answer to that question. But now I realized the truth, that this Amish family may have been turned against me before I was even born because I was conceived through an adulterous relationship. After all, my mother bore a scarlet letter, so to speak.

  Perhaps, to their minds, that letter simply extended to me as well.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I left the cottage immediately. After sitting in my car for a few minutes, I went to a florist shop, picked up a bouquet of red roses, and then drove to the home of Lavonne Bauer. She lived just outside of Paradise, a couple of miles from Susan Eicher’s house, in a modest, one-story colonial with a tidy, well-landscaped yard. I’d decided to pose as a delivery person. I just wanted an excuse to see her—I wasn’t necessarily going to talk to her. But she wasn’t home. On the way back to Marta’s, I threw the roses, all twenty-seven dollars worth, out the window, one by one.

  That evening I was shocked when Alexander showed up at Marta’s cottage in a white van. I looked out the front window as he spoke to the driver and then climbed out. According to Mammi, this kind, gentle Amish man was not my father after all, a thought that filled me with a deep sense of loss.

  It also confused me, given my name. If he weren’t my father, then why had I been named Alexandra?
Had it simply been a matter of wishful thinking? A way to honor a supportive brother-in-law? Surely it hadn’t been mere coincidence, my mother giving me a name so similar to that of her sister’s husband. There had to have been some reason for it, I thought, watching from the window as he walked to the door and knocked.

  “Lexie? Who is it?” Ella asked from her perch at the dining room table.

  “Your Uncle Alexander,” I replied, moving toward the door and swinging it open, glad that Marta was upstairs. I only hoped she hadn’t heard him knock.

  As Alexander came inside and took off his hat, I realized for the first time that I looked nothing like him. Neither did Ada, for that matter. He greeted Ella and Zed shyly and then explained he had come here to speak with me. Obviously sensing that this was to be a private conversation, Ella told Zed that it was time to take care of the chickens.

  “I’ll help him,” she said, giving me a funny look as she followed her brother out the door and pulled it shut behind them.

  I gestured toward the living room, and once Alexander and I both sat down he spoke in a low voice, saying that Ada had told him about my request.

  “Did she tell Klara?” I spoke as softly as I could.

  “No, thank goodness.” His hazel eyes pled with me. “Please don’t pursue this.”

  “Are you my father?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Are you Ada’s father?”

  He sat up straight. Now his eyes drilled me. “Yes,” he answered. “With everything I am, I am her father.”

  I swallowed hard. Ada and I both knew a daddy’s love. Still, there was something odd about his choice of words.

  “But… are you her biological father?” My voice wavered.

  He fingered the brim of his hat nervously. “You don’t have any idea the damage you are set to do,” he said. “You are pushing all of us to the brink. You can’t imagine how fragile the people involved are.”

  “Ada doesn’t seem fragile at all. In fact—”

  He interrupted me. “I beg you, let this go.”

  A door opened upstairs, and I inhaled. Alexander and I should have been the ones to go tend the chickens. “You should leave,” I said.