The Laments (2 page)

Dr. Underberg’s Compromise

As the crow flies, Southern Rhodesia lay six hundred and thirty miles north of Johannesburg. It was a different country, a British colony where a young, educated white South African might find new opportunities. In 1954, fresh from Cape University, Julia Clare found a position teaching art and English in a primary school while she pursued her painting career. Howard Lament was offered an engineering position at the Water Works in Ludlow, a township thirty miles south of Salisbury.

It was in Ludlow that they met and fell in love. And their lives might have been no more remarkable than those of any other happy couple had it not been for Dr. Samuel Underberg.

The man responsible for changing their lives was only recently appointed head of the obstetrics ward at Salisbury’s Mercy Hospital. Underberg was an exceptional doctor, a man who had logged twenty years and thirty thousand miles delivering African babies and running a postnatal clinic from the back of his mud-spattered Land Rover. His face was ruddy, his shiny head fringed by gray wisps, his body small and wiry, and his gestures emphatic. He punctuated his radical ideas with jerking elbows and splayed fingers. But the trustees of Mercy Hospital passed him over three times because of his wrinkled tweed suit, the tightly gnarled tie he slipped over his head every morning, and the muddy boots beneath his trouser cuffs.

Instead, Mercy Hospital hired a daunting succession of well-attired directors: Dr. Gladstone left for a better-paying position in Nairobi; Dr. Macy defied his contract and took an early retirement; and the last one died before anyone managed to remember his name. With some exasperation, the board of trustees sought a doctor who was young, healthy, and neither upwardly mobile nor financially demanding. One look at Dr. Underberg’s Land Rover confirmed the latter of these issues, while one look at the doctor confirmed the former.

Samuel Underberg firmly believed that African mothers could teach the Western world a few things about child rearing.

“First,” he declared to his interns, “this notion of taking a child that has been nestled in his mother’s womb for nine months and
stuffing
him in a tin pram for the
next
nine months is absurd.

“Absurd!” he repeated, with the index fingers of both hands pointing upward, “to deprive a child of his mother’s warmth, her heartbeat, and,
even worse,
her milk. African women carry their children slung on their backs—skin to skin, heart to heart—all day long, and these babies are blissfully content.” He gestured casually at a white couple (for this was a
white
hospital) leaving with their newborn in a pram with enormous wheels and a hood. “While
these
people wonder why their children are so bloody miserable all the time!”

“But, Doctor,” said a pimply young man in a spotless white coat, “surely you don’t expect white mothers to sling
their
babies over their backs like natives? It’s hardly civilized . . .”

“Civilized?” snapped the doctor. “A word used to justify everything from bottle-feeding to the atom bomb!”

“You don’t approve of bottle-feeding?” whispered another scandalized student.

“In Africa,” replied the doctor, “the lack of sterile water makes bottle-feeding a baby
killer
. If bottles, nipples, and formula had arrived two thousand years ago, we’d all be dead of dysentery. No human race left!”

The ruddy philosopher slid to a halt—his rubber soles scuffing the shiny white linoleum—whereupon he dismissed the students and swept into Julia Lament’s room.

“
NO NAME YET?
” he asked as he squeezed the Lament baby’s toes.

“Sorry.” Julia smiled.

“My dear Julia, I’ve a favor to ask,” said the doctor, who sensed in her failure to name her baby a healthy resistance to convention that suited his newest objective.

“Yes?” she said, both flattered and made anxious by his informality.

“It’s an unusual one, but quite serious,” he added, frowning to make his point.

“Tell me.”

“I have a patient who delivered a two-and-a-half-pound premature infant last night. The child is in an incubator. I wondered if you might be willing to let her hold little . . . little . . .
Lament
here, so that she gets used to touching a baby.”

“Touching?” repeated Julia with reluctance.

“The problem is rejection,” explained the doctor, “a sense of distance, a feeling that the baby is not really hers.”

“Just touch him?” she said with skepticism.

“Actually,” said the doctor with a fixed smile, “I meant nurse him, too.”

“Nurse
my
baby?”

“Imagine, Julia,” said the doctor, holding an imaginary bundle before her, “you have carried your baby for so many months, and then, for thirty days, you can’t touch him. He’s in an incubator, fighting for his life. Consider the sense of loss. Consider, perhaps, feeling that you don’t
have
a baby anymore. Consider sitting in a ward like this with lots of other women holding their newborns while you sit alone. Imagine your breasts full of milk with no baby to take them. You may think my request unorthodox, but I assure you it’s quite a common practice.”

“In Europe, you mean?”

“No,” said Dr. Underberg. “Among African women.”

“African women?” she replied uncertainly.

Prepared for the inevitable reaction, the doctor continued, “Not that thousands of years of experience producing happy and healthy infants should make a difference to you”—he sighed—“but this small act of generosity could help a mother who, I fear, is in danger of losing that precious bond with her child.”

“Yes,” replied Julia cautiously. “What a shame that would be.”

“I thought I saw the rebel in you, Julia,” said Dr. Underberg, slapping his knees. “The first day we met, I knew you were different. You’ll show the establishment a little gumption!”

As the doctor sailed down the hall, Julia’s resolve hung in the balance. It had been five years since Mrs. Urquhart’s assault on Beatrice. Was Julia still a rebel? She looked down at her darling boy. He let out a peep, and his eyes opened briefly. Then, perhaps it was only in her imagination, but he seemed to tip his head with a small, rallying nod.

A HEAVYSET WOMAN
lay in a nearby maternity room with her eyes squeezed shut. There was no baby beside her. She was a mother yet not a mother.

“Mary?” said a voice.

It was her imagination calling. Nobody cared about her. Not the nurses. Not the doctors. Not Walter. Not even God.

“Mary, open your eyes.”

I will not.

Perhaps she could just shut out the world this way. Perhaps if she didn’t look, listen, or speak she could vanish of her own accord.

“I have someone for you to meet.”

She relaxed her eyes enough to see Dr. Underberg place a small bundle in her lap.

Mary’s lower lip trembled at the small face beaming at her. Nevertheless, she gritted her uneven teeth.

“This. Isn’t. My. Baby.”

“No, but he’s very hungry. Perhaps you could feed him as a
favor
.”

Mary shook her head, closing her eyes again. “I don’t have any milk.”

“Will you try? Please?”

She loosened her nightie but shook her head. It wouldn’t work. She felt empty of will. Of milk. Of life.

Suddenly the little thing reached out with two tiny grappling palms, and with a snort and a gasp, it climbed toward her left breast, eyes shut, face weaving left and right until it corked its open mouth with her nipple.

Stupefied at the urchin’s determination, she watched him begin to suck vigorously from her breast.

“Bloody hell,” she whispered.

Dr. Underberg nodded vigorously. “A bit like a homing pigeon, isn’t he?”

The baby paused, raising his wrinkled head. The two of them stared at each other like strangers at a social, puzzled at being thrown together. The baby went back to work on her breast, but now he was watching her. Mary felt unable to turn away; between the action in her breast and the baby’s hypnotic glance, she was slipping into a pleasantly placid state; then she remembered the doctor standing nearby.

“Why’s he staring at me?” she asked.

“Babies do that. He adores you.”

“Me?” She looked back at the infant. His eyes regarded her with such clarity, such lack of doubt, that she felt herself falling into his power; together, they were merging. His eyelids closed, and Mary’s thoughts drifted, forgetting the empty beds around her, forgetting about the nurses, the doctors, her lost love, and even God’s abandonment—everything except the strange new bond she felt with this contented infant.

“
WHO
IS
THIS WOMAN?
”
Howard Lament was pacing the hospital room. “And why does she have
our
baby?”

“African women do this all the time, darling,” said Julia matter-of-factly.

“Julia, African women walk around without a stitch; it wouldn’t justify your doing the same thing. And, besides, you might have asked my opinion!”

“We’re rebels, darling.” His wife smiled. “I knew you’d understand.”

This gave Howard pause. Standing in his blazer and white pants, he rather liked the rebel idea. He wasn’t going to be like his father, living in the same house his whole life; no, he and Julia were going to see the world like the other Laments. There was the Lament who sailed with Cook to the South Pacific; and Great-grandfather Frederick Lament, who arrived in South Africa in 1899 and started the first bicycle shop in Grahamstown. Howard’s two older sisters had followed their husbands to Australia; and his cousin Neville always sent postcards from his trips to Patagonia and Nepal. To be a Lament was to travel. Yes, he liked the rebel idea quite a lot.

“
HE’S ALL TWITCHES AND STRUGGLING LIKE,
” said Mary to Dr. Underberg. “I call him Jack because he’s always climbing up the hill”—she giggled—“but once he gets to the top, wild horses couldn’t tear him away from that pail of water!”

Dr. Underberg noted that the baby
di
d
seem different with Mary Boyd than with Julia Lament. The infant’s movements were more strident, there was more grabbing and pulling, perhaps because Mary was a larger woman and her physical terrain was a challenge to navigate, or perhaps because this provoked more attention from Mary. The doctor made a note to himself to investigate this issue more fully in a paper. In the meantime, it was clear to him that the exchange had restored Mary’s desire to live.

“You’ll see your own little one after lunch today,” he said.

Mary looked up, puzzled.

“
Your
baby, Mary. He’s gained four ounces,” the doctor reminded her.

“Oh”—Mary blinked—“then you think he’ll live?”

The doctor frowned. “Of
course
he’ll live! There was never any doubt. Look,” he decided, “after you’re finished we’ll pay him a visit.”

THIS WAS MARY’S SECOND VIEWING
of her son, and she was disheartened. The neonate was dwarfed by his incubator; hair ran up his tiny spine; he resembled a little bush baby with his enormous eyes and minuscule hands. Like the membrane of an onion, his skin was transparent, exposing the desperate tangle of blood vessels that kept him alive. To her dispirited eye, he was more hatchling than human.

“All premature infants look this way,” the doctor assured her. “But in just a few weeks he’ll be a bouncing baby. This fellow, Mary, will look just like little . . .
Jack
.” He opened one of the circular holes on the side of the incubator. “Go ahead, give him a stroke.”

“A stroke? Like a dog?”

Dr. Underberg looked at her in disbelief.

“He
needs
your touch, Mary. He needs a reason to live, and your warmth will give him that.”

Mary patted the tiny creature with her index finger. She noticed its fragile rib cage rise and fall, and winced that her body had produced a mite so ill equipped for life.

MARY BOYD’S ESTRANGED HUSBAND
,
Walter Boyd, was listening to the BBC’s shortwave broadcast of cricket. Australia was about to beat England. Walter could recite the test match scores for the past fifteen years. Though he could never remember the players, he found numbers comforting—phone numbers, account numbers, his last six electric bills: he recited them to calm himself. When the phone rang suddenly, he counted five rings before answering.

“Thought you might want to know that I’ve just had your baby,” said a familiar voice on the other end.

Startled, Walter dropped the weather statistics from his edition of the
Sunday Mail
. He buckled forward, clutching the phone—using the stern voice he reserved for strangers.

“Who is this?”

“Mary. I’m in Salisbury.”

“Mary?”

“Yes. Mary. Your wife.”

The phone line went dead, but Walter kept it to his ear, expecting somehow to get a full explanation from the telephone company. When none came, he counted the stripes on the cuff of his shirt while the cricket match turned to white noise and the conversation replayed in his brain.

I’ve just had your baby.

“
HOW LONG ARE YOU STAYING IN THE HOSPITAL?
” asked Julia’s mother, Rose D’Usseau, formerly Rose Clare, formerly Rose Frank, formerly Rose Willoughby. It wasn’t that she was hard to live with—she just grew bored with her husbands easily. An elegant, delicate woman with a proud manner, she made a wonderful first impression; men fell for her left and right. Once married, she dressed them, changed their haircuts, reformed their habits, enrolled them in the right clubs, redirected their careers. Her work done, she mentally dusted off her hands and looked for a new challenge.

“Till the morning,” replied Julia.

“Thank heaven,” sighed Rose, regarding the drab hospital room with disapproval. If she didn’t renovate men, she might have set her talents to historic buildings.

“And the poor thing still has no name?” she continued, eyeing the sleeping bundle in Julia’s lap.