The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Dr. Levine was in his sixties, with an air of genial distraction. He wore bifocals that slid down a long, slender nose. Marie didn’t know which angle to work. Should she do the kicked puppy, mewling and woebegone? Or lay it on the line as a tough cookie looking for a quick fix? Let me know now, Doc, I got the cab outside, and the meter’s running. But that worked when the only issue on the table was the price. Could she just be herself, for a change?

  “How can I help you, Mrs. Melchionne?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “I will not offer congratulations, until we are sure.”

  The doctor took her blood pressure, checked her pulse, and made notes on his chart. He asked her height and weight, rather than taking measurements himself. Maybe that showed a willingness to cut corners? He didn’t wear a wedding ring. Was a playboy better than a mama’s boy? She was grasping at straws, she knew.

  “We’ll need a urine sample.”

  “I know,” Marie said. “I just don’t want to have to wait five days to find out if the rabbit died.”

  Dr. Levine laughed and set the chart down. “Young lady, the rabbit always died, whether the results were positive or negative. Is this your first pregnancy?”

  “No, I have a daughter, she’s nine.”

  “That explains it,” he said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “They don’t use rabbits anymore. There’s a new test. The 1960s have been good to rabbits.”

  “I’m delighted for them.”

  “Rabbits replaced rats, frogs, and toads,” the doctor went on, as he scanned the bookshelves behind him for the relevant volume. “It was the same principle, injecting the creature with urine, watching for ovulation. Miraculous, really, the advance it represented. I was already out of medical school then. Anyone who said they knew how to detect pregnancy before was practicing witchcraft. But it must have seemed like witchcraft after—rats and toads! At least they didn’t use black cats. Science, young lady, it moves very quickly. Who knows what 1970 will bring, 1980? Maybe cancer will be like the common cold by then. We should live so long!”

  The talk of witchcraft reminded her of Mrs. Abbie. She’d foreseen a son, by another man, after Sid had gone insane. Three predictions for twenty dollars. Only time would tell if it was a boy, but the witch was dead wrong about the daddy. As for Sid’s sanity, Marie wasn’t sure if she had the perspective to judge, given that she was an inmate in his asylum.

  The doctor handed her a paper cup. Marie withdrew to the lavatory and produced her specimen. The cup felt as hot as if she’d filled it from a kettle. It didn’t feel normal, although she knew it was—body temperature, 98.6 degrees. Still, the intensity of warmth was unsettling. She set the container down carefully in the center of the sink, as if it were unstable, incendiary, a grenade with a loose pin. Marie stood up and then sat down again, closing her eyes. She could picture a glow inside her. When the city was a hundred degrees, there were fights in the streets, and old people died panting in their beds. A hundred degrees didn’t seem natural at all. Who could live inside themselves, in such fevered heat?

  When she returned, she set the cup down on the counter. Could she leave now? She hadn’t even hinted at what she wanted. He seemed to be a decent man, but decency didn’t work to her advantage. “How long ’til the test comes back, Doctor?”

  “Tomorrow, because it’s late,” he said, his eyes bright with cheer. “Had you come this morning, you’d know by now. Are you very anxious about the good news? It’s very natural. I can give you something to help you sleep.”

  Marie wanted to tell him that he was right about her anxiety, but wrong about the cause, not to mention the cure. Instead, she had an overwhelming feeling she had disappointed him. Spasmodic sobs left her mouth, and tears her eyes, and she covered each with a futile hand, as if the doctor could not see behind one, or hear behind the other. She felt like a child. She did not want to be a mother again.

  “Please sit down, Miss,” he said, guiding her to a chair. “Would you like a glass of water? A cigarette?”

  He took out a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of his lab coat. Marie shook her head. She sat down and leaned over, breathing deeply until the emotion passed. She decided to dispense with her stratagems and confess what had happened to her, why she felt as she did. “I’m sorry. This pregnancy is not what I wanted. My husband and I . . . our circumstances are not ideal. He is violent with me. He was violent with me, when this child was conceived.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” he said softly, lighting a cigarette. “You poor girl. You don’t deserve that. No one does.”

  Marie didn’t know if she expected more. What could he do, order a strict regimen of not being beaten for the next eight months, along with vitamins and bed rest? She felt better for having spoken, and she was glad for the simple compassion of what he said in return. A little shot of sympathy—straight up, no chaser. Did he have anything else for her? When she looked at him, his eyes remained kindly, but nothing came out of his mouth but smoke. “Thank you, Doctor. Do you have kids?”

  Marie had to draw him out. Dr. Levine turned away, as if to look for an ashtray, and stepped back, five or six paces, taking her in from a broader perspective, noting her shoes and clothing, to see if they were cheap or not, clean or not. He walked back to her and sat down, his gaze trained on her cheeks, her neck, and then he picked up her hands to examine them. “Yes,” he said. “Three daughters, one of whom, like yourself, was married to a man who . . . did not appreciate her. How long have you been married?”

  “Eight years. Ten, I think.” Marie smiled weakly, abashed that the flubbed number wasn’t done for effect.

  The doctor nodded. “And the violence, it has been going on for some time?”

  “Since the beginning.”

  “What I mean to ask is if any particular misfortune—like losing a job, say, or a death in the family—that could be a factor. Did anything like that happen?”

  “He has a steady job. His family, he isn’t really in touch with them.”

  “Does he abuse alcohol?”

  “He drinks, but I wouldn’t say to excess.”

  “Does he hit you when he’s sober?”

  “He has.”

  “Then I’m sorry to tell you, Lana, that there isn’t much hope. Getting drunk or being broke, they aren’t good reasons for a man to beat his wife, but they’re reasons. If he wasn’t himself because he lost his job, he could get another one. If he was a brute when he drank, he could stay away from liquor. But it sounds like your husband is being himself, and he’s just plain mean. Deep down, mean to the bone. You could live to be a hundred and fifty, and they still won’t find a cure for that.”

  Marie felt weak, and her sight went hazy. She felt oddly relieved to hear that her pregnancy wasn’t her worst problem.

  “Do you work, Mrs. Melchionne?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a secretary, a legal secretary.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s . . . in sales.” Marie hadn’t expected the second question, and her lack of preparation showed. Marie could see him making the calculation: Italian surname plus evasion about her husband’s livelihood equals you-know-what.

  “Well,” he continued cautiously, “I’m glad you have a career, the ability to make a living on your own. I don’t know if you’re religious or not, but I’m friendly with Father Miglione over at St. Francis Assisi, and you’ll find him very easy to talk to. And even though . . . how shall I put it? Let’s say that, even though many people from your background are reluctant to go to the authorities, especially with intimate issues, family issues, the police can help. They really can. As it happens, my brother-in-law is a lieutenant at the precinct.”

  The doctor watched closely for her reaction, but Marie remained stone-faced. She felt like laughing, just a little. Che bella fortuna! What wondrous chance had brought her here to this wise and humane physician, who could provide her
safe conduct to the authorities, secular and sacred? “My brother-in-law was very helpful with my daughter, and I’d be happy to call him. Go see him, you can sit down and talk. Nobody has to get arrested. Sometimes, just a word of warning, it can help.”

  Again, he sought to gauge her response, but she betrayed nothing. He advanced gently from sentence to sentence, pausing between them as if wading with her, step by step, into deeper water. “I could call him now, if you want. He’s at work, I believe. Not that you have to talk to him, right away, but you’d feel better if you do. It’s no trouble, and—”

  “Thank you, Doctor, but I don’t think—”

  “Let me be frank, Mrs. Melchionne,” he said, his voice suddenly firm, knowing that she would follow him no further. “You’re going to have to face some facts about your life, your marriage, and you’re going to have to make some hard decisions. He has to change his ways, or you have to leave him. It doesn’t sound as if he’s likely to change. I think you know that.”

  The doctor placed a tender hand on her shoulder. “Otherwise . . .” He drew on his cigarette and dropped it, exhaling, and then breathed again, as if the weight of his words needed the full force of his lungs to be uttered aloud. “Otherwise, you could lose the baby.”

  Marie’s eyes widened before she lowered them. Her mouth tightened, but she wasn’t smiling. She didn’t think that she was smiling. She hid her mouth with her hand, just to be safe. Her hand felt as if she’d fallen asleep on it, and her face did, too. She was numb, head to toe. A tingling nothingness, inside and out. She kept her head down. Over the years, her head had become a filing cabinet of reasons why she couldn’t go to the police with her problems. Now, this stranger wanted to make an appointment for her? Under her alias, which also happened to be the name of the Director of the Policewoman’s Bureau? And the miscarriage of which he warned—this direst of consequences, this worst-case scenario—would have been a wish come true for her. And if Sid beat the baby out of her—well, she’d been beaten so often for nothing that she might as well get some benefit, for once.

  “All right, then, Mrs. Melchionne. Go home, have a nice dinner, get some rest. We won’t know for certain about the pregnancy until tomorrow morning. No need to make an appointment, just come in. Positive or negative, those are the two possibilities. But the other condition that afflicts you? Without treatment, so to speak, you may have a long, unhappy life, or a short one. A bad bargain, either way.”

  “I see, Doctor.”

  “I sincerely hope you do.”

  As Marie drove back to Yonkers, she allowed herself to weep for the entire ride home. She had an idea that grief would pass, that it would leave her body like morning sickness, and she’d feel better after some fresh air. But even as she drove with the windows down, and the salt breeze bathed her face as she crossed the bridge, tears poured from her eyes. She imagined so many of them falling from her that the rivers rose below. She could cry forever, but she could only bleed so much. Dr. Levine’s prescription was simple: Stay, and you’ll die. Leave, and you’ll live. Marie wished she could have stayed as his patient. There was a beautiful confusion to him. He could be so perceptive, even profound, while being so mistaken about what she wanted, who she was. Of course, she hadn’t told him the whole truth. And he wasn’t half wrong in thinking that she was married to a criminal. She was nearly home before she stopped crying.

  Tonight, of all nights, she had to go over to Dee’s, to see the new car. Over the past few years, vehicle purchases had come to occasion a family gathering, as fixed in ritual and mandatory in attendance as Easter dinner. The tradition had begun when Marie had won her Renault on the game show, back in 1958. None of them had owned a new car before, but once Marie had hers, secondhand would never do again for Papa. And then the rest had to assemble to view the latest Ford or Chrysler when it arrived at one of the sisters’ houses.

  “Look at the chrome!”

  “What color’s the leather? ‘Cream,’ you said? It’s just beautiful.”

  “I can see why they call it the ‘Executive Model.’”

  “Che bella.”

  All of them would be there tonight. Vera had three children now, and a genial goliath of a husband who doted on her. Italian, of course—Vera was now Mrs. Gaetano Calabrese. Guy managed a construction crew and would doubtless rise further still. The old homemaker-breadwinner split suited them fine. When Guy and Vera looked at each other, the love in their eyes always made Marie’s heart break a little, despite herself.

  As she parked in the driveway, she inspected her face in the mirror and wiped her tears. At least she was better off than Ann, she thought, in a moment of guilty cheer. Marie hated to admit it, but Sal made Sid look like a bargain. Sal’s employment history was checkered—Marie didn’t know if he had a job now—and whenever the subject of their lack of offspring arose, he’d bellow, “Alls I know is, ain’t nothing wrong with my brazziole—ask anybody!”

  What a brazziole Sal was, Marie thought, unwilling to even think the word in English. The sense of fraternity among the brothers-in-law was haphazard. Luigi and Guy didn’t go to ball games or bars together, but they were well-disposed toward each other, as the “good husbands.” For Sal and Sid, bars and ballgames were just the beginnings of their nights out. Marie didn’t want to know about the middles or the ends. She’d done well enough at not-knowing until Carmen called.

  Marie left the car and gently stroked the branches of the fig tree before she went inside, glad to see new buds. She felt better, but the emotional toll of the day still showed in her face, and she readied a ruse as she walked in. “Anybody home?”

  Marie heard a tattoo of footsteps coming downstairs and waited until Sandy was almost in sight before she declaimed, “Achoo!”

  “Hang on, honey,” Marie said, ducking down, covering her face with her hand. “I have—ah, ah, ah—“ She held out a hand to stop Sandy’s charge. “Achoo!”

  “Do you have a cold, Mommy? Are we still going to Aunt Dee’s?”

  “No, just a little hay fever,” said Marie, standing again, flicking imaginary tears away from where so many real ones had just run. She waved at Katie as she emerged from the living room. “And yes, we are going. Get me a tissue, and—Sandy, you look like a coal miner. What have you been doing?”

  Sandy was in purple corduroys, a yellow sweater, both mud-streaked, as were her cheeks. “Dodgeball at the Walshes’. Can I wear my new pink dress?”

  “No, it’s a casual affair. Katie, would you go with her to wash and dress? I’d like to freshen up myself, and we should get going. And take the car, go see a movie. Of course, you’re welcome to come to my sister’s, if you want.”

  The women proceeded upstairs for their ablutions. Marie was sitting in front of her vanity when Sandy joined her, having been made presentable again with surprising dispatch. Katie hovered at the edge of the door. Sandy began to pick and poke through the cosmetics.

  Marie hoped she wasn’t too indulgent with Sandy, but she tended toward leniency, recalling the austerities of her own childhood. Mama always handed down the maximum sentence, no matter how slight or inscrutable the offense. Sandy wouldn’t be pelted with shoes for roller-skating, or sent off to school every day with the baffling admonition to “guard her skirt.” Matters on which Marie was inflexible were also inspired by her early life, such as the rule that Sandy have dinner at six every evening, with Katie or whoever was there. Marie knew that her childhood hadn’t been miserable, by any means. It just could have been much happier. Her household had escaped the worst deprivations of the Depression, the sacrifices of war. All of them loved one another fiercely, in their own ways. Was it possible that Sandy’s childhood was less happy than her own? There was enough food here. A bigger house, in a prettier place. Katie, an indispensable angel, night and day. If Katie left, Marie didn’t know what she’d do, especially if there was another baby. If? God forbid, God forgive me.

  “Mommy, do you have to sneeze again?”

  “I
think I—Achoo!”

  “Bless you, Mama.”

  “My goodness! That’s what you get, with an early spring. Anyway, now I’ll do my lipstick. Watch, Sandy, how it’s very light, and then you blot with tissue.”

  Sandy leaned in close. “Can I try?”

  “I’ll put it on, and then Katie will show you how to blot.”

  Katie took a tissue from the box and tore it in half, as not to waste it.

  “Wait, don’t move!”

  As Sandy kept her mouth open in a perfect, just-saw-a-ghost O, Marie traced its contours with the slightest smear of pink. Katie folded the tissue paper and held each edge at the corners of her mouth.

  “Close now, slowly,” Katie said, her tone grave and momentous. The two women were so synchronized, so simpatico, that Marie thought of Katie as something like a sister and something like a comother. She had to remind herself, in humility, of their differences. Katie had been an orphan. Sandy doubtless heard nights of her parents’ shouting from behind closed doors, but Katie had heard real bombs drop. Perspective wasn’t the least of Katie’s contributions to the household, but it was the only one for which Marie couldn’t forthrightly thank her.

  “I’ll take that lipstick now, Sandy dear. Katie, hit the road, go out and enjoy.”