Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  There were moments today when I found myself staring at the water in the lake and getting the chills when I thought about where I might be when it freezes.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  DOCTORS DO NOT PROTEST, they lobby. They are not the sort of people who will stand around outside a courthouse with placards and sandwich boards, or hold hands and sing rally songs. Mid-wives, on the other hand, are. Midwives are exactly the sort of folk who will use public spectacle to make a political point.

  And so while doctors made their presence felt in a variety of powerful ways before and during my mother's trial--they just loved to testify--they did not stand on the steps of the Orleans County Courthouse.

  That responsibility fell upon the midwives.

  The Monday my mother's trial began, my family was greeted in Newport by somewhere between sixty and seventy people, counting the midwives and their clients. There were women whose faces I recognized, like Cheryl Visco and Megan Blubaugh, Molly Thompson and Donelle Folino, and there were a great many women and men I'd never seen before, but who, apparently, believed passionately in a woman's right to labor in her own bedroom. There were some of my mother's patients there as well, faces I remembered from prenatal exams at our house as recently as the previous winter. Inside, we'd soon discover, were even more of my mother's clients, quietly knitting or nursing in the three back benches.

  We saw the supporters as soon as we drove down Main Street that morning, standing like a phalanx along both sides of the courthouse steps and in long lines on the grass that extended out from the walkway to the front door. We had driven to Newport in my mother's distinctive old station wagon, and so we were recognized immediately, and a cheer went up as we coasted into the parking lot between the courthouse and the lake.

  "Set Sibyl free, let babies be!" was the first chant we heard from the group, and we heard it the moment we emerged from our car. Of all the chants we'd hear over the next few weeks (and we'd hear many), that one was my least favorite. It implied my mother wasn't free; it suggested prison and confinement and my family's destruction.

  Unfortunately, to this day it's the one I hear most often in my head. The others--either doggerel that linked hospitals with laboratories, or ditties that elevated home birth to a religious rite--come back to me when I think hard about those weeks, but they don't pop into my head today like bad songs while I'm seeing patients or brewing coffee.

  As planned, Stephen and a young associate from his firm were already waiting for us in the parking lot when we arrived. There had been a frost the night before, so even though the sun was well up by eight-thirty, the air still felt cool and I could see Stephen's breath when he spoke.

  "You have some fans," he said, motioning toward the demonstration across the street.

  My mother smiled. "Are you behind this?"

  "God, no! We made sure we'll have some friends once we get inside the courtroom--quiet friends--but those campers over there came on their own. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy they're here, but I had nothing to do with it."

  The adults all shook hands, and I was introduced to Stephen's associate, a man a few years his junior named Peter Grinnell. Peter lacked Stephen's polish, and it was clear he had a liking for fried dough and sausage heroes--the epicurean specialties of the town and county fairs that begin in Vermont in early August and continue until the first weekend in October. His hair was thin, his skin unhealthy, and he needed to lose a good thirty or forty pounds.

  I couldn't imagine where this fellow fit into the dignified--downright intimidating--law firm I'd seen a glimpse of that day in Burlington; I was surprised someone like Stephen even wanted him working there. Peter was wearing an overcoat, so I couldn't see his suit, but I found myself hoping it was, as Stephen would say, one click above whatever Bill Tanner would be wearing.

  "How do you feel, Sibyl?" Stephen asked.

  My mother shrugged. "I can feel my heart beating pretty fast. But I think I'm okay."

  "Fired up?"

  "No, Stephen, you know I'm not," she said, shaking her head, and she sounded almost resigned. "I'm not a fired-up kind of lady."

  "They are," he said, and he pointed with his thumb like a hitchhiker at the midwives and home birthers behind us.

  "They're not me."

  "Well, you look--" Stephen stopped himself midsentence, a pause that was at once awkward and uncharacteristic for my mother's lawyer. "You look like you're ready," he said finally.

  What Stephen meant to say, I've always assumed, was that my mother looked beautiful. Or heroic, perhaps. Or courageous. Because my mother did look, at least to me, like all of those things. She seemed tired and she was pale, but looking back, I think I understand in a twisted way why at least one nineteenth-century convention of female beauty was vaguely tubercular--why, even at the end, Bram Stoker's Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker were still considered lovely. My mother had a cornflower-blue clip holding back her blond hair, and she was wearing a modest, almost schoolgirl-like green kilt she'd bought specially for the occasion. Unlike the other midwives both inside and outside the courthouse, she wore leather loafers and stockings.

  But I think Stephen stopped himself because my father was present. He probably would have told my mother exactly how attractive he thought she was had the two of them been alone.

  "Sure, I'm ready," my mother said. "I don't really have a choice now, do I?"

  "No. Guess not."

  My mother nodded, and my father wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

  "It's cold out here," he said to the lawyers and me. "Let's go inside."

  "Grandma's not here yet," I said, speaking to no one in particular.

  "Is your grandma the type who could find her way into the courtroom?" Stephen asked.

  Before I could answer, my father said he would walk with us as far as the front door of the courthouse and then wait for grandma there. And so amidst the aroma of fresh paint and poster board, the five of us made our way through a small sea of women in paisley peasant skirts and babushkas, men with beards that fell halfway down their chests, and dozens and dozens of male and female feet in heavy wool socks and sandals.

  I hadn't realized that Charlotte Fugett Bedford had a sister and a brother-in-law. Somehow I had missed the detail that she had a mother.

  And no one had told me that the three of them had traveled from Alabama to Vermont to sit in a bench behind Bill Tanner and his deputy and watch my mother's trial.

  But when I walked into the courtroom, I knew instantly who they were. No one had to tell me. The two women had more than a vague resemblance to their dead kin, and the way the younger woman leaned into the younger man for support suggested marriage. And all three of them were wearing clothing too summery and thin for Vermont in the last week of September.

  I saw them before they saw me, and so that first morning I was able to look away before our eyes met and I would have to acknowledge the sadness that had scarred their faces. Although I don't believe I had ever viewed the Fugetts or the Bedfords as possessing the sort of evil Bill Tanner embodied, somehow that summer I had managed to forget or ignore that my mother was not the victim in this tragedy, or that--in most people's eyes--she was not the only one who was suffering.

  Twenty-eight possible jurors were sat by the bailiff in four rows of seven: Two of those rows were in the raised jury box itself, and two more were in wooden chairs with cushioned seats directly before it. That meant the first two rows were lower than the pair in the jury box, and so that side of the courtroom looked a bit to me like a movie theater. The seats had a downhill sort of slope.

  In addition, another dozen possible jurors were seated in the two benches in the courtroom nearest the jury box, and as the morning progressed and Bill Tanner asked a seemingly endless number of questions, some of them took the place of their peers in the rows along the side of the courtroom.

  The goal was to find twelve jurors and two alternates whom both Stephen Hastings and Bill
Tanner would accept. Each side was allowed to strike up to six people without offering the judge a reason, which meant that if there were only one or two challenges for cause--the elimination of a possible juror for reasons as dramatic as an admitted bias, or as pedestrian as a doctor's appointment during the trial that simply could not be rescheduled--a jury could be built from that first group of twenty-eight people.

  Of course, it rarely happened that way, and my mother's trial was certainly no exception. There was no limit to the number of possible jurors who could be eliminated for cause, and the lead attorneys on both sides seemed to be quite good at rooting out reasons to have people excused that would not demand they use any of their six precious preemptory strikes.

  Perhaps somewhere in the files in the basement of the Orleans County Courthouse, or on a floppy disk or computer in one of the offices on the building's second or third floors, exist the names of the couple of dozen women and men who were part of that original late-September pool. Perhaps not. But many of the names of that first twenty-eight (and of the reinforcements who joined them, as one by one Stephen or Bill Tanner excused someone after eliciting yet another reason why that individual could not objectively or logistically sit in judgment upon my mother) have blurred in my mind with the names of the final fourteen.

  Not the faces, however; I still know the faces and features of that final fourteen well. Moreover, I know--or at least I believe I know--exactly whom Stephen was happy to have sitting in the jury box for two weeks, and exactly who made him uncomfortable.

  "Would you want people on the jury who love the idea of a home birth, or people who think it's an incredibly foolish notion?" Stephen asked my parents and me the Thursday night before the trial started. Stephen had taken my family to dinner at a French restaurant in Stowe, the sort of place that had me pulling blouses and skirts from my closet for forty minutes before I found a combination that I thought was at once appropriately elegant and sufficiently cool. Stowe was slightly closer to Reddington than Burlington, but it was still vaguely equidistant between the two, and I imagine Stephen was hoping a dinner out would rally my mother's spirits before the trial finally began.

  We had finished eating and the three adults were sipping their coffee when Stephen broached the subject of the jury's configuration.

  As if he were a law school professor and the Danforth family a small group of students, he continued, "What do you think: Would you want a group who thought home birth was a perfectly safe proposition, or a group who thought it riskier than landing an airplane in a hurricane?"

  "I suppose I'd want people who approved of home birth," my father said quickly. "They'd be more sympathetic."

  "More sympathetic to Charlotte or Sibyl?"

  "Sibyl," my father answered, and instantly I began to fear that the conversation was about to take one of those turns that I dreaded. I couldn't tell if my father's answer was wrong and his mistake would embarrass--and then anger--him, or if the discussion would deteriorate simply because the subject was so volatile. But I knew I didn't like the way Stephen put down his coffee cup and shrugged after my father blurted out my mother's name.

  "Maybe those are the sort of people we'll want," Stephen said slowly, "but maybe not. Obviously my partners and I have gone around and around on this one. Personally, I want to see the jury stacked with people who believe home birth is a reasonable way to have a baby. But I have two partners who are quite convincing when they argue that I should try and get a group who thinks the idea of having your baby in your bedroom is a terrifically stupid stunt, a group who ..."

  "A group who what?" my mother asked Stephen when he paused.

  "Forgive me, Sibyl," Stephen said, taking a deep breath before finishing his thought. "A group who thinks the idea of home birth is so ... dangerous that Charlotte Bedford got what she asked for."

  My mother tilted her head and rested the fingers of one hand on the small of her neck. I remember that all of the tables in the restaurant--filled that evening with the sort of wealthy, elderly couples who packed Vermont in the fall to watch the leaves grow yellow and gold and fantastic shades of red--seemed to become quiet around us, and suddenly I no longer even heard the tapes of classical music that had been playing throughout our meal. I heard a high ringing in my ears, and I wondered what would happen first: Would my mother cry, or would my father snap at Stephen?

  I was wrong; neither occurred. I believe my father might have been about to tell Stephen angrily that his remarks were out of line, but my mother spoke first. Though tired, though unwilling to buck up in the sort of physical, visible ways the men around her wanted, my mother was still very strong.

  "I don't think that would be very smart," she said, her voice soft but firm. "I don't think it will do any of us any good to make my mothers or me look like idiots."

  Stephen nodded, and the music and conversation and the sound of silverware on fine china returned. "I agree. I'm just telling you what some of my peers believe," Stephen said.

  My father sat back in his chair. "So I was right. You'll fill the jury with people who believe in home birth."

  "I doubt I can 'fill' it with them. But if I find people who seem to think that way, I'll try and keep them." He turned to face my mother directly and continued, "I'm sorry. I was simply hoping to convey how complicated all of this is, even for me."

  "Even for you," my father said. "Imagine."

  "As a lawyer, Rand. That's all I meant."

  "I understand."

  Stephen sighed. "I've probably swallowed half my shoe already. But at the risk of putting even more in my mouth, I'll tell you something else: Right now I probably understand better who I don't want on the jury than who I do."

  "And that is?" my father asked.

  "Well, let's see. First of all, I'm going to try and stay away from women of childbearing age. I'm not sure they could separate themselves from the victim. And I don't want any nurses or doctors or EMTs. No volunteers from town rescue squads. The last thing we need are people who aren't nearly as knowledgeable as they think they are trying to second-guess Sibyl. And, of course, there won't be a soul on the jury who's ever been anywhere near a bad birth experience--ever had one, or seen one, or heard about one real close to home. That I can assure you."

  "Will you want more men or women?" my father asked. My mother's fingers were still resting upon her neck, and although she was staring right at Stephen--and probably had been since he apologized a moment earlier--I don't think she saw him. I'm sure on some level she was listening, and I'm sure she would have jumped back into the conversation if she needed to defuse a bomb smoking between her husband and her attorney; otherwise, however, she seemed content to sit quietly and let the two men waste energy on conjecture.

  "It's not as simple as a male-female thing. I wish it were. I think in this case it's more important to get smart people."

  "Because of the experts?"

  "Yup. A smart person will hang in there when they're hearing testimony about something like standards of care. Or what the autopsy showed--and didn't show. And smart people won't automatically assume that the State's doctors or experts have more credibility than ours."

  And so when the lawyers began building a jury--asking question after question of the farmers and store clerks and elderly loggers who comprised the pool--I understood whom we wanted on the panel and whom we did not. I sat in the first row of benches directly behind my mother and Stephen and Peter Grinnell, with my father on one side of me and my grandmother on the other, and I made a list in my mind of who I hoped would be left in the end in the jury box.

  A pair of law clerks from Stephen's firm and Patty Dunlevy sat with my family on our bench, but the three members of Charlotte's family had their bench to themselves. People wanted to give them their space. Otherwise there were no free seats in the courtroom.

  The Danforth and Fugett family benches were in the same row, but our families were buffered by a wide aisle and the private investigator and the clerks. Only when
I was studying the pool of jurors sitting along the part of the wall nearest the door was there any risk that a part of the Alabama contingent might turn a head and I'd be caught staring, or I'd have to look instantly away to avoid what I feared would be a hateful glare.

  One of the few times I was watching the Fugetts, however, a moment just after the original group of twenty-eight jurors had been seated, I realized one important part of their family was absent. I leaned around my grandmother and asked the clerk beside her, a young woman I'd been told was named Laurel, "Where's Reverend Bedford?"

  "He'll be testifying," she whispered, "so he's sequestered. He won't be in the courtroom until we get to the closing arguments."

  "Will Foogie come?"

  "Foogie?"

  "The little boy," I answered, and then, remembering there were actually two little boys now, added quickly, "the older boy."