Midwives (1997)

by Bohjalian, Chris

  Chapter 18.

  I doubt I'll ever talk to Anne again, so I guess I'll always be wondering: What did she think would happen when she picked up the phone and called B.P. Hewitt? Did she expect something different? Or did she get what she wanted?

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  ANNE AUSTIN HAD NOT worked with my mother for very long, and so she had not become a part of our lives the way her predecessors had. Heather Reed, for example, was no substitute for a big sister, but she spent close to six years on the periphery of our family--days and days doing prenatals in the room off the kitchen, dinners at our house almost weekly, the evenings she would baby-sit me when my mother and father would be out someplace together--and there was little of importance I wouldn't have shared with her when I was in elementary school. Heather always seemed to know when I'd been fighting with Rollie or Sadie, she was an unfailing source of help with my homework, and she was a strong shoulder in times of trouble.

  But I had barely known Anne Austin when Charlotte Bedford died. Over the years it has become difficult for me to differentiate my opinion of the woman after the turmoil from my opinion of her before it, and to remember that I did not always despise her. But the fact is, Anne had only been a part of our lives for one winter when Charlotte died; she had only been assisting my mother since the previous December. She'd had dinner at our house two or three times, and on occasion I'd seen her coming and going on those days my mother had pregnant women stopping by for their checkups. She had struck me, I believe, as a sweet but mousy thing with brown hair she kept short: the sort of woman I came across once in a while in college who would trade a party on a Saturday night for an evening bent over books in the science library, yet would still fail to do very well on the exam. The trade, more often than not, was triggered by shyness rather than drive, and an organic chemistry test was merely a reasonable excuse to avoid loud music and aggressive boys.

  But I don't think when I first met Anne I thought she was self-righteous or smug; I don't think I thought she had it in for my mother. That impression grew during the summer and fall as my mother's trial approached, and I'd hear the adults discussing once more what had occurred the night of the thirteenth and the morning of the fourteenth.

  "And that's when you broke her water," Stephen said to my mother on one of those occasions, referring to Charlotte, when the two of them were alone in the kitchen.

  "That's right."

  "And what did Anne ask?"

  "She didn't ask anything."

  "But she said something ..."

  "She said, 'I don't understand why you did that.'"

  "And it wasn't meant as the sort of question an apprentice might ask her midwife? It wasn't a ... a part of the learning process?"

  "No. She was irritated with me. She thought I was intervening."

  "Intervening?"

  "Interfering with the natural process."

  "Was that the first time she had gotten mad at you?"

  "She didn't get mad at me. She was just annoyed."

  "First time?"

  My mother laughed. "Good Lord, no!"

  "She was often annoyed with you?"

  "Anne has just read too many books and been around too few births," my mother said, and although I was listening from a perch on the steps in the front hall, I was sure she was rolling her eyes.

  Anne was twenty-two when she came to my mother, and until that winter she hadn't seen a baby crown or caught a newborn once in her life. But she had visions in her mind of what a perfect birth was like, and it was clear from the dinners we shared that she had indeed read copiously about the subject. Under my mother's tutelage she studied hard, and my mother thought she was a fine apprentice, despite Anne's periodic frustration with what she viewed as my mother's tendency to intervene. Anne wanted desperately to become a midwife, and there was no reason to believe that someday she wouldn't succeed.

  By the time the trial began, however, she had grown in my mind from a mousy little midwife-wannabe to an arrogant traitor of almost theatric proportions: pietistic, self-important, and--for reasons I couldn't fathom--bent upon the destruction of my family. She had left Vermont the weekend Charlotte Bedford died, apparently coming back only twice before the trial: once for a deposition and once to pack up the possessions she had left in the room she was renting from a college professor in Hardwick.

  But when she had first phoned B.P. Hewitt--my mother's backup physician--six and a half months earlier, I doubt she hated my mother. I doubt she hated her even after B.P. tried to reassure her that she had not witnessed a cesarean on a living woman. When she picked up her phone to call the physician, I tend to doubt she even understood the fusion she was about to trigger, the linear progression of events she was about to unleash--a progression which, in hindsight, could not possibly have had a good end for my family. But for all I know, her intentions may even have been kind, her desires noble: A woman was dead, and something had to be done.

  Yet the stakes must have grown large for Anne Austin that morning, and I would not be surprised if even today she cannot fully explain why she did what she did. Perhaps she thought that B.P. would share her first phone call with my mother, and that would effectively end her apprenticeship. After all, how could my mother ever trust Anne again after she had called her backup physician behind her back?

  And so she had to convince herself that she was right, my mother was wrong. She'd call Asa Bedford, find out what he'd seen. And then, once she had broached her fears to the husband, fears reinforced by his own horrific memories--spurts of blood from the woman on the bed--she had to call the state's attorney. She had to. Perhaps she feared that the reverend would if she didn't, and then she herself might be charged as an accessory to a crime. She was, after all, the midwife's apprentice. She'd even gone with Asa to get the knife.

  No, I really don't believe Anne Austin hated my mother when she started her phone calls that bitter morning in March. But I do believe she grew to hate her over the summer; I do believe she learned to despise her. She had to; her mental health demanded it. How else could she have justified the pain she was inflicting upon my mother and upon my family? How else could she have lived with herself?

  By the time the trial began, I am quite sure in Anne's mind my mother was a sloppy and dangerous midwife, and deserving of the punishment before her.

  I could see it the moment she arrived in court Friday afternoon, just after we'd all stood for the jury and judge and then retaken our seats. She marched to the witness stand, careful to stare straight ahead, but I could still see the loathing she had for us all sparkle in her round dark eyes, and the way she had her jaw set against us.

  She and my mother hadn't spoken since they left the hospital in Newport that Friday morning in March; they hadn't said a single word to each other. I watched my mother study Anne as she was directed across the front of the courtroom and sworn in by one of the court officers, and it was as if my mother were seeing for the first time a twin she hadn't known before existed, or a rare and frightening animal in a zoo--the sort of creature that would cause one to run or cringe were there not steel bars as a buffer. My mother slowly swiveled her chair so she was facing Anne directly, and for one of the few times in the trial I actually saw her whispering to Peter and Stephen when the shock of seeing Anne finally wore off.

  My mother seemed to be more perplexed than angry. Occasionally she shook her head slightly, a small gesture that seemed to me to be asking Anne, Why are you doing this to me?

  Anne's voice had a slight trace of Boston I hadn't recalled from the winter, and it made her seem stronger, more authoritative. She was small-boned and she looked tired, but the young woman--a mere eight years older than I--sat up straight and spoke well, telling the jury in measured tones of the horrors she had witnessed, and how my mother had used a kitchen knife to cut open the stomach of a living woman in Lawson.

  It was during Anne's testimony that the jury began growing uncomfortable, and began t
o steal glances at my mother. Although Anne did not begin speaking until the afternoon of the fifth day, the trial's first Friday, and although the panel knew well the outline of what had occurred in the Bedfords' bedroom, they had not yet heard an account from an eyewitness. And as Anne answered question after question Bill Tanner asked, I think Charlotte Bedford grew real for the first time in some of the jurors' minds.

  In all likelihood, that was Tanner's plan. All of the individuals the State had put on the stand so far were mere warm-ups for the final three, a troika of powerful witnesses who in theory would seal my mother's fate. Anne Austin and the medical examiner on Friday afternoon. The Reverend Asa Bedford on Monday morning. Even at fourteen I understood instantly the logic of this progression: The first witness, the one who had initiated the litigious part of this saga, recounts the nightmare she saw. The second, an expert with powerful credibility, explains the exact cause of death. And the third, the one who had lost the most, serves as the medley's anchor.

  What I did not appreciate until later that Friday (and what I might not have appreciated for years had Patty Dunlevy not explained it to me) were the subtleties of Tanner's order. The last witness the jury would hear before the weekend--two full days during which they would stew upon all they had seen and heard the first week--would be the coroner giving the State's version of the cause of death. Then, if the State had any fears that their case had lost momentum over the weekend, they knew that on Monday morning they had the widower left, a grieving but articulate pastor who was--to take liberty with a cliche--very much accustomed to public speaking.

  By the time Stephen had an opportunity to cross-examine Anne, most of the jurors must have had a picture in their minds of Sibyl Danforth as an alarmingly slipshod midwife, a woman whose carelessness would eventually cost one mother her life. Moreover, when they envisioned my mother on the morning Charlotte Bedford died, they must have imagined her as a lunatic: a midwife who became hysterical and panicked, a woman who temporarily lost her mind and grew capable of hacking apart a living woman in the final stages of labor. (Would things have ended differently if insanity had actually been my mother's defense? They might have for me, perhaps, but in the long run the outcome would not have been much different for my mother. And though I did not know then that Stephen had once broached the idea of temporary insanity as a possible defense, at the time my mother still believed she would resume her practice once the trial was over, and vetoed the discussion instantly. No one, she told Stephen, wanted a midwife who went certifiable under pressure.)

  Like my mother, Anne dressed for court in an uncharacteristically conservative outfit: a white blouse, cardigan sweater, and gray skirt. No midwife-wannabe work shirts for her that day; no baggy dresses with monster pockets. She looked like a young bank teller from Burlington.

  Throughout her testimony she had avoided looking at my mother, and I noticed that when Stephen stood up to begin his cross-examination, he remained behind his table so Anne would at least have to stare in my mother's general direction.

  "Prior to Veil Bedford's delivery, you had only seen nine births, correct?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "And none of them resulted in an emergency situation, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Veil Bedford's was the first, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "Prior to March fourteenth, had you ever been in an emergency situation?"

  "Like what?"

  Stephen strolled behind my mother's chair so Anne would see her. At first she turned toward the lake and stared at the puffy white clouds floating by over Canada instead. "A car accident, maybe. Ever been in a car accident where people were badly injured? Or come across one?"

  "No."

  "Plane crash?"

  "Of course not."

  Stephen shrugged. "Train wreck? Man with a heart attack? Baby falling into a pool?"

  "No, nothing like that."

  "Never?"

  "Never."

  "And you've never been with an EMT or rescue squad volunteer in a life-and-death crisis, have you?"

  "No."

  "Charlotte Bedford was the first, wasn't she?"

  "Yes, she was."

  "And you've never witnessed surgery of any kind, right?"

  "Like in a hospital?"

  "Yes. Like in a hospital."

  "No."

  "Do you have any formal medical training?"

  "You mean like at a college or something?"

  "Yes. Exactly."

  "Not yet, but I'm planning on--"

  "Thank you, Miss Austin. You've never even taken an accredited first-aid course, have you?"

  "No."

  "And you don't know CPR, do you?"

  "I know it a little. A few days after Charlotte died, I was going to start--"

  "Are you formally trained and certified to administer CPR?"

  "No."

  Stephen raised an arm and I thought for a moment he was going to rest his hand gently upon my mother's shoulder, but he didn't. Instead he merely reached inside his suit jacket for a pen. "Was Charlotte Bedford the first person you ever saw die?" he asked, and for the first time that afternoon he raised his voice a notch and sounded ready for one of the confrontations he seemed to relish.

  "Yes."

  "When you saw the blood that resulted from Sibyl's attempt to save the baby, was that the first time you'd ever seen a body opened?"

  "I'd seen pictures in textbooks."

  "Please, Miss Austin, I didn't ask if you'd ever looked at a body in a book. Was that the first time you'd ever seen a body opened?"

  "I guess."

  "Yes?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank you." Stephen took the pen and began tapping it lightly against the table for a moment, perhaps hoping to distract Anne into looking his way. "So prior to the early-morning hours of March fourteenth, you had never seen the quantities of blood that might or might not flow in that situation. Correct?"

  "Yes."

  "You'd never seen blood spurt from a living or a dead body?"

  "No."

  "In that case, what in your background led you to make the wild assumption that the blood you saw that moment was coming from a living woman?"

  "It was the way it spurted."

  He shook his head. "I'm not asking you what you think you saw. I'm asking you what in your background led you to think that based on the bleeding Charlotte Bedford was alive?"

  "You didn't see it. If you had been--"

  "Your Honor, please instruct the witness to answer the questions," Stephen said abruptly.

  Judge Dorset looked down at Anne and said simply, "Miss Austin, you will answer the questions."

  "But if any of--"

  "Miss Austin," the judge added, and he sounded almost as annoyed as Stephen, "answer the questions as they are asked. Please. Mr. Hastings, proceed."

  "What part of your training led you to think that the blood you saw was coming from a living person?" Stephen asked, and he continued to tap the tip of the pen slowly on the table.

  She folded her arms across her chest. "I don't recall."

  "Is that because you have none--absolutely no medical training?"

  "I guess."

  "Am I correct in saying that any conjectures you made about the blood were founded on absolutely no experience--no first- or second- or even third-hand experience?"

  Finally she looked in Stephen's direction and when she saw my mother she shut tight her eyes against tears, but they were too much. She sniffed back some, but her answer was still filled with her sobs. As if Stephen hadn't asked her a question, as if he weren't even present, she cried with the suddenness of lightning at my mother, "God, Sibyl, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I had to do it, I had to call! You know you killed her--"

  Stephen tried to cut her off. He demanded the remarks be stricken from the record, and Judge Dorset slammed his gavel down on his bench a thousand times harder than Stephen had tapped his pen on his table a moment earlier, but befo
re breaking down and triggering a recess, Anne managed to sob once more, "I'm sorry, Sibyl, I am! I know you didn't mean to, but we both know you killed her!"

  My mother sipped water from a paper cup in a small, windowless conference room during the recess, and my father held her hand. She looked a little paler than she had before Anne's outburst, and sometimes she simply pressed the rim of the cup against her lower lip.