Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  "Well, I hope we don't keep your mother too long."

  "What are you doing next?"

  He removed a tape recorder about as long as a postcard from one of his blazer's front pockets, and half as wide. "I'm just going to ask her a few questions. Nothing too tough tonight."

  "You're not going to take notes?"

  "Oh, good Lord, no."

  "That's what the police did. My parents said the police took notes."

  He opened the recorder and showed me the tiniest audiocassette I'd ever seen in my life, a tape little bigger than a postage stamp. "Well, the police have their methods, and I have mine. And you know what?"

  "What?"

  "Mine are a whole lot better."

  It may have been the confident way that he spoke, and it may have been the ramrod way that he stood. It may have been the way he was dressed, that one-click-above blazer. It may have been all of those things combined. But I went to sleep that night absolutely convinced that if my mother indeed needed a lawyer--and, in all of our minds, that still wasn't a sure thing--she had the best one in Vermont.

  Chapter 10.

  Connie had a cup of coffee with breakfast yesterday. First time, but I think it's going to become a regular thing. I didn't ask her if she liked it because that would have been just too much like a parent. And I didn't stop her, although the idea crossed my mind. She isn't even fourteen yet.

  I remember what I was doing when I was fourteen. It was a lot worse than coffee, and somehow I made it to fifteen. So I told myself this coffee thing is okay, she knows what she wants, and tried to chill out.

  She must have put in two whole packets of Sweet'n Low. And I'll bet the coffee still wasn't as sweet as my girl looked to me. She was still in her nightgown, and she had on those slipper socks on her feet: big wool socks with leather soles. Rand was already up and out the door--until this whole horrible thing is over, I think the only time he'll ever get any work done is before the rest of the world is even awake--and she just shuffled into the kitchen, shuffled across the floor, shuffled over to the coffee mugs on the pegs by the toaster, and started pouring herself a cup.

  I think I must have been staring by the way she stopped mid-pour and then looked over at me.

  "Okay if I have a cup?" she asked.

  And that's when this really weird sentence formed in my head, the sort of sentence I can hear my own mother saying to me: Don't you think you're a little young? So I just nodded like, you know, no big deal. And while on the one hand it isn't--it's coffee, and she sees her dad and mom practically mainlining the stuff--on the other hand, it is. It's one more step for our girl.

  I want to write "little girl." But she hasn't been a little girl in years. I probably shouldn't even think of her as a girl anymore. The person in a nightgown and slipper socks is a young woman. (God, wasn't it just yesterday she was calling them "slippy socks"? Probably not. It was probably half a decade ago.) And I don't just mean she's a young woman physically, though it's clear as she stands in her nightgown that her body has changed. Height. Hips. Breasts.

  I mean she's becoming this young woman emotionally. She's always been very mature for her age, but she has some moments these days when she seems totally grown up to me. She still sounds pretty kid-like when she's on the phone with Tom Corts, and from a distance she still looks pretty kid-like when she's grooming the McKennas' horse with Rollie. But the way she's handling the bigger things right now is amazing to me. That's when she seems like this little grown-up person. Like when she was reading all those horrible newspaper stories Sunday morning. She was practically dissecting them like she was one of those Sunday-morning news commentators on TV.

  Or when she met my lawyer last night. That's a perfect example. When she met Stephen. She was this little diplomat, making sure he had whatever he needed, asking him these really good questions, and telling him these really funny stories.

  She even asked him if he could stay for dinner. Just like a little diplomat. Just like a young diplomat. Not little. Young. And while he couldn't stay for dinner last night, I have a feeling he will be having dinner with us other nights this spring. Connie will have to see a lot of him, which is only unfortunate because of what he does, not because of who he is.

  I know Connie's scared. I know I'm scared. I don't know what to do about that in either of our cases.

  Here's what I think I'll do about the coffee. She can have coffee in the morning before school, but not after dinner. If she wants to start the day with a cup of coffee, that's cool. But none before bedtime because she is still growing, and she does need her sleep. That's how we'll handle this coffee thing.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  WHEN CHARLOTTE FUGETT BEDFORD died, the midwives were scared. The lay midwives, that is, the ones without any medical training, the ones who did the home births. Not the nurse-midwives: They worked with doctors and delivered babies in hospitals, and had no reason to be frightened.

  But the lay midwives feared--rightly, it would prove--that the medical community would try and use the woman's death as an indictment of home birth in general. As winter slowly gave way to spring, however, and my mother was charged with a crime and treated like a criminal, when the midwives learned the conditions of my mother's bail, their fear quickly grew into anger. Fury, to be precise. And while the midwives I have met in the course of my life have many, many strengths, an ability to have a dispassionate conversation about home versus hospital birth or a willingness to discuss the conduct of one of their own with anything that resembles an objective detachment is not among them. Moreover, if--as Tom Corts had put it--doctors are predatory pack animals like wolves, then midwives are herd animals like elephants: Attack one, and the others will rush to the wounded animal and do all that they can to defend it.

  In the months after Charlotte Fugett Bedford died, our house was filled with midwives. Sometimes they came with food as if someone in our family had died, sometimes they came with flowers: When May arrived, our house grew rich with the sweet aroma of lilacs; in June the dining room and kitchen were filled with the scent of sweet honeysuckle and narcissus. Occasionally they brought with them the names of other midwives around the country who had also experienced a--to use the midwife's euphemism for virtually any fatality, deformity, or grotesque malformation--"bad outcome." Sometimes they appeared with the names of those women's lawyers, a gesture which initially I assumed Stephen Hastings would find threatening. I was wrong. He was thrilled.

  Early on he asked my mother to share with him the names of these midwives and their attorneys so he could discuss with them their trials and their defense strategies. From a lawyer in Virginia he got the name of one of the forensic pathologists who would eventually testify on my mother's behalf; from a midwife in Seattle he heard the story of the midwife in California who had been tried for practicing medicine without a license after she injected Pitocin and Ergotrate into a woman in labor.

  The midwives who visited us came from all over New England and upstate New York, and a few traveled distances that absolutely astonished me, just for the opportunity to meet and console my mother. When some of the news articles about her were sent over the wires, midwives in places as far as Arkansas and New Mexico read about her plight, and one from each of those states ventured to Reddington as a show of solidarity.

  These women, regardless of whether they were from a rural corner of northern New Hampshire or an urban neighborhood in Boston, regardless of how well they knew my mother, were huggers. They never shook her hand when they met her, they always embraced her. This went for my father, too, if he happened to be home, and for Stephen Hastings if he happened to be visiting. They, too, would be hugged. Moreover, these were not the sort of mannered little squeezes society matrons or youthful debutantes might share at dining clubs or cotillions in Manhattan, these were emphatic bear hugs of impressively long duration. These were the sorts of decorum-be-damned greetings that begin with arms opened like wings, which then close arou
nd one like a straitjacket. I hate to think of the sort of damage they might have done to their clothes if these midwives or my mother had been the sort who wore makeup.

  The Vermont midwives, all of whom knew my mother, rallied around her like Secret Service agents around a president who's been shot. They brought her casseroles and stews; they left in our kitchen absolutely mammoth tureens of gazpacho, escabeche, or sweet pea and spinach soup. They baked multigrain breads and blueberry muffins, gingerbread cookies and decadent chocolate tortes. They wrote my mother poems. They penned editorials for the opinion pages of Vermont newspapers; they wrote letters to legislators and the state's attorney. They conducted "teach-ins" to explain home birth at public libraries in St. Johnsbury and Montpelier. Cheryl Visco and Donelle Folino organized a quilt sale to raise money for my mother's legal defense fund, while Molly Thompson and Megan Blubaugh wrote hundreds of fund-raising letters on her behalf. Midwife Tracy Fitzpatrick's sister and brother-in-law owned a vegetarian restaurant in Burlington, and she convinced them to have a special fund-raising dinner one night, with all of the proceeds going toward my mother's defense.

  Some midwives dedicated births to her, and I don't believe there was a baby born at home in Vermont over the next six or seven months whose picture wasn't presented to Sibyl as a boost to her morale: This, said those snapshots and portraits of boys and girls born in bedrooms and living rooms, is what you're defending. This is why you must fight. I know of at least three young women living in Vermont today who are named Sibyl, each of whom was a baby born at home in the summer or fall of 1981, their names a not insignificant homage to my mother.

  And, of course, the midwives helped out my mother by accepting her pregnant clients as patients, once the State insisted she stop practicing, at least temporarily, as a condition for bail. Often they actually conducted the prenatals in the women's homes to save them the additional burden of traveling after the trauma of losing their midwife.

  Most of the time, I think, my father was glad to see my mother receiving all of this support from the midwives. It took some of the pressure off him. Sometimes it boosted his spirits, too. And as a family we really did eat very well that spring and summer. But there were other times when my father grew irritated, tired of the way his home had become a coffeehouse for a New Age world of women in sandals, for tireless earth mothers in wraparound paisley skirts. I think he found Cheryl Visco especially annoying.

  The day after Charlotte had died, literally moments after my parents had returned from a Saturday spent with lawyers and emergency-room doctors, she appeared at our house with a ragged manila envelope overflowing with legal information she had amassed over the years from the Midwives Alliance of North America: the names of the women who had been tried for one reason or another, the outcomes of the cases. Bad copies of ancient newspaper articles. Lists of insurance companies. Law firms.

  And in the weeks immediately after the death, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the State was slowly and methodically building a case, Cheryl would drop by almost every other day for no other reason than to offer moral support. Sometimes she'd appear with one flower, sometimes with a note card she thought was funny. Sometimes she'd have the name of a book my mother should read, sometimes she'd have the book itself.

  When she arrived late on a weekday afternoon, she would stay for dinner. When she arrived on a weekend morning, she would stay for lunch. The days were indeed growing longer as March became April, but--as my father said--when Cheryl was there they seemed to last forever.

  Cheryl was probably in her early fifties then, but she was still a beautiful woman. Her hair was gray, and unlike most gray hair it still looked magnificent long. It fell like curtains down her back, usually draping a tight black sweater or the top of a long-sleeved but close-fitting black dress. Cheryl was close to six feet tall, more slender than most women half her age, and the subject of all sorts of rumor and gossip: She had three children from three different fathers, only one of whom she had actually bothered to marry. While some people assumed the relationships failed for the reasons the marriages of many midwives go bad--ridiculously long hours and a completely unpredictable schedule--others attributed the fact that Cheryl was a three-time loser in love to a flighty morality and a loose set of values. If she had had one husband and two significant partners over the years, the gossips whispered, she had most certainly had thirty lovers. Maybe three hundred.

  Personally, what I believe did her marriages in was her truly astonishing ability to speak for hours at a time without stopping to breathe. She could tell whole stories without ever inhaling, recount lengthy anecdotes without so much as a pause. It drove my father crazy, just as it probably drove most men in Cheryl's life away. In my experience, men aren't particularly good listeners, and to be around Cheryl for any length of time demanded patience, passivity, and an insatiable interest in Cheryl Visco's life.

  Of course, Cheryl adored my mother, and in those weeks when my mother was still reeling from the death up in Lawson, Cheryl was the perfect friend: present but undemanding, company that necessitated no effort. My mother could simply sit still and listen, perhaps nod every so often if it felt right.

  "Chance is the strangest word in the world, isn't it?" Cheryl might begin, speaking slowly at first but gathering momentum like an obese teenager on skis. "One syllable, six letters. It's a noun, it's a verb. Change one letter and it's an adjective. And everything about it scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days--there's a chance something could happen. Don't get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street--I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don't have your baby at home--there's a chance something could go wrong. Don't, don't, don't ... Well, you can't live your life like that! You can't spend your entire life avoiding chance. It's out there, it's inescapable, it's a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it's absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are! There's nothing that drives me crazier than when people say home birth is chancy or irresponsible or risky. My God, so what if it is? Which, in my opinion, of course, it isn't. What's the price of attempting to eliminate chance, or trying to better the odds? A sterile little world with bright hospital lights? A world where forceps replace fingers? Where women get IVs and epidurals instead of herbs? Sure, we can cut down the risk, but we also cut off a lot of touching and loving and just plain human connection. No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive."

  Although Cheryl lived over an hour away in Waterbury, she would sometimes stay until ten or eleven o'clock at night. Some nights when I would go upstairs to do my homework or call one of my friends around eight or eight-thirty, I would leave her lecturing my parents. I'd hear my father escaping soon after, trudging upstairs with the excuse that he was tired. Later, when Cheryl had finally gone home and my mother had struggled upstairs herself, I'd hear my father comment angrily on Cheryl's uncanny ability to outstay her welcome. Some nights his tone was more caustic than others; some nights his voice was louder.

  On the quieter nights he might simply remark, "She can't keep a husband because she can't shut up." But when he was particularly disgusted or he'd had an extra scotch during dinner, I might hear him raise his voice as he said, "We have enough stress in our lives without her! The next time she shows up and won't leave, call me. Call me and I'll sleep at the damn office."

  My mother would then shut their bedroom door, and I would wait silently at my desk, listening, wondering if tonight the fight would blow up or blow over.

  We learned on Monday night what had happened to Anne Austin, my mother's apprentice. We didn't learn because the woman herself called my mother back, or because she finally answered the phone one of the many times my mother called her. We didn't learn because she appeared at our door after Stephen Hastings and his photographer left, or because we ran into her while shopping at the
supermarket.

  We learned because B.P. Hewitt--Dr. Brian Hewitt--called from the hospital during dinner and said he wanted to drop by when he finished his rounds. My parents said sure, and much of our conversation as we finished our meal revolved around why my mother's backup physician wanted to come by our house. As far as I knew, he'd only been here once before, and that was three years earlier when it seemed half the county was in our yard for the "graduation" party of sorts my mother held for Heather Reed, an apprentice who'd been with my mother for at least half a decade and was about to embark on a career of her own.

  "How much does he know?" my father asked, pushing the skin of a baked potato around his plate with his fork.

  "About Charlotte?" my mother asked.

  "Yes," my father said, after inhaling deeply and slowly so he wouldn't snap at her. But the sound of that breath murmured clearly, Of course. What the hell else could possibly be on his mind?

  "I told him what I remembered. I told him the basics."

  "When did you talk to him? Was it Saturday or Sunday? Or today?"

  "As a matter of fact, it was Friday. Friday morning. I called him from the hospital before I even went home. Why? Do you think it matters when I called him?"