The Midwife of Hope River (8 page)

11

The Majestic

It was at the Majestic in '09 that I met my first love, Lawrence Clayton, an artist, scene designer, and student at the Art Institute of Chicago. During rehearsals, I'd stare at his hands as he painted the canvas sets, watch his delicate strokes. Eventually he asked to walk me home. We took the long way.

Soon it was a regular arrangement. We'd stroll along the boardwalk and throw bread to the pigeons in Washington Park. It didn't matter what we did, we were so happy just being together.

I guess I was reckless, but that's the way of young lovers, isn't it? I missed one period and then another few. Since I'd never been regular, I wasn't concerned; in fact, I didn't know I was pregnant until Cassandra, my roommate, another chorus girl, asked me when I'd last had my monthly.

It seems strange now that I couldn't tell I was carrying, never even thought of it, but my mother had died before my first flow and no one had ever discussed the birds and the bees with me.

When I finally told Lawrence about my pregnancy, he was thrilled but apprehensive. His mother, an Episcopal minister's daughter, and his father, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, were sure to disapprove. The money for his education came from a small stipend his grandmother had left him, and he depended on his parents for his room and board, but he had little cash. That's why he worked part-time as a scene designer.

Finally we could wait no longer. We wanted to marry, and he had to inform his family. (It was easier for me. I had no one to explain things to, no one to judge me.) My beloved was on his way home to ask for their blessing when he was killed in that train wreck at Western Springs. I read about it in the
Tribune
over soft-boiled eggs and rye toast. The front-page article listed the sixteen dead,
Lawrence Frederick Clayton
near the top. I traced his name with one finger and then collapsed like a tree cut off at the base. Lawrence was gone, his mouth that had kissed me, his hands that had touched me, his mind that had loved me.

It was shock that brought on my labor, I'm sure of it, and then the bleeding and the terrible pain. The baby was too early; not that it would have mattered, even a full-term infant couldn't have survived that kind of blood loss.

The professor and his grief-stricken wife never learned about me or their son's child. If the baby had lived, maybe I would have searched for them, but when the blood poured out of my womb, erupted like a flash flood on the Des Plaines River, I knew all was lost.

 

Milkmaid

“I
can't
bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.”

I wake in the little house on Wild Rose Road with tears wetting my pillow. That's what the matron at Chicago Lying-in Dispensary told me. That's what she said.
“I can't bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.”
The chatter of the other women in the small hospital ward turned off like a spigot.

 

“Dead?” I feel myself shoot down a long dark cold tunnel. This was the baby I'd made with Lawrence, my lover who had died not one week before.

“Smelling salts!” the nurse yells.

When I come out of my faint, a cool cloth mats down my long hair and the nurse leans over me.
Is she telling the truth?
All I can remember is blood running out of me and the night ride in the horse-drawn ambulance down the brick streets.

But why would she lie? If she wants a baby, infants born out of wedlock are a dime a dozen. I should know. I had lived in the House of Mercy, just one of the scores of foundling and orphan asylums in Chicago.

The nurse scrapes a chair across the wooden floor and sits down beside me, but she isn't interested in easing my grief. She's a hawk eyeing her prey. I am just sixteen.

“Elizabeth, if you'll join the staff as a wet nurse,” she puts on the pressure, “you won't have to go to an orphanage or back on the streets. You'll be given a bed in the room with the other wet nurses, and you'll have plenty of food. We only take healthy and well-spoken young women. It's a respectable profession . . .
and,
” she threatens, “if you don't get the milk out, your breasts will crack and fester.”

My eyes fill. I had planned to breastfeed, as my poor deceased mother did and all sensible women do, but I have no baby to suckle, and let's face it, no home or livelihood either. My friends from the Majestic don't know where I am or what's happened to me. After Lawrence died, I never went back to the theater . . . just couldn't walk in there all pregnant and weeping.

 

Now here I am alone with milk dripping down my front and an offer of good food and shelter. It seems the easiest way. I put my hands on my breasts, already as hard as doorknobs. I thought there were no tears left, but the well of sorrow never runs dry.

 

There were three of us then, Wilma, Nola, and I. Wilma was twenty and had been a wet nurse the longest. When her milk dried up, to get more, she went out and got pregnant again,
on purpose.
After the birth, Dr. Shane took her unwanted baby home to his wife, who couldn't have one.

The other wet nurse—she came after me—was Nola. The nurses found her on the steps of the hospital, shivering in the cold, breast milk frozen on her thin cloak, and the matron took her in eagerly. She'd delivered at home with a midwife, but her pa had taken her baby because Nola was only thirteen. Then he'd sold it.

When we weren't needed for suckling, the three of us were assigned to housekeeping; none of the dirty jobs like emptying bedpans, just dusting and mopping, and we weren't allowed in the rooms when patients had fevers either. That's why we called each other milk
maids,
because of our cleaning duties.

I wasn't bitter. We laughed when we said it:
Milkmaid
. . . “Milkmaid” sounded nicer than “wet nurse.”

12

Advent

Tick-tock, tick-tock
. . . with Bitsy gone, my only company is my dogs, Emma and Sasha; my calico cat, Buster; and Mrs. Kelly's ornate black-and-gold mantel clock. Still no change in the weather, but on a trip to the barn the air smells like snow, a clean winter smell.

 

When Mrs. Kelly and I first moved here, I felt I'd been dropped into a foreign land, Greenland or maybe Madagascar; everything was so strange. I'd been cut adrift. And I was scared too. For the past twenty years I'd lived in the city. I was scared of snakes and bears and skunks. Scared of hoot owls and night noises. Scared of the dark and the huge sky, so lonely without humans around. It wasn't so strange for Sophie; she'd grown up in Torrington, just forty miles away, had gone to nursing school there before moving to Pittsburgh, and had spent summers on the farm with her grandparents.

It was hard at first to get used to no indoor plumbing, electricity, or access to a telephone, but over the last few years I've adapted. The lack of machine noises soothes me. The yellow kerosene lamplight is restful. Even the outhouse isn't so bad. It gets you outside, and there's always something to see. Today four mallards came in from the north and landed in the yard. I ran inside to get cornmeal, but when I came back they were gone, heading south.

 

Around ten, just before bed when I go outside to be sure the barn is secure, I notice that a wind has come up, but still no snow. I lift my head, scanning the sky, as my father, the sailor, would do. Clouds scuttle past the moon, moving fast, blotting out stars. Later, when I get up to use the porcelain potty that I keep, on cold nights, behind the bedroom door, I stop at the window. A few lazy flakes float down like torn paper. “There's the big storm MacIntosh warned me about!” I think.

 

The next time I stir, it's morning and my bedroom is filled with a strange white light. Outside, every bush and tree, every limb and twig is laced with snow, a fairy wonderland. I throw on my robe and run downstairs to build up the fire. There's eight inches of powder on the fence rail, and the flakes are still falling.

“Snow for Christmas! Sasha and Emma!” I exclaim, dancing around and rousing them into a frenzy. I dress quickly, pull on my boots, and go out to feed Moonlight, then take the dogs for a walk up the back hill to cut a small pine tree. I even fall backward in the snow, creating snow angels.

Last Christmas I didn't have a tree, didn't celebrate at all. Mrs. Kelly was dead. Ruben was dead. Nothing to celebrate, really. It was bitter cold, and the frozen ground was as bleak as my soul.

Now back in the house, I prop my small pine in a bucket of spring water and craft paper chains from colorful ads in the
Ladies' Home Journal
s I found in the attic. For icicles, I cut foot-long pieces of thick white yarn, and, since I don't have a star, I attach one of Mrs. Kelly's wooden angels at the top. My project takes most of the day.

“Don't you think the tree looks nice?” I ask Emma and Sasha as they sprawl on the braided rug next to the heater stove. They tilt their heads back, considering; then Emma stands up and licks my hand. Buster, my calico, snoozing on the back of the davenport, is unimpressed.

 

Last winter, I cried all the time, cried because I missed Mrs. Kelly and Ruben, cried for Lawrence and my mother and father and all the others long gone to me. The tears could have filled a washtub. Even the pregnant women stopped coming around, not that I was in any shape to help them.

The rest of the season was a long hibernation, but in spring I woke up. Sally Feder, who'd given birth to twins with Mrs. Kelly when we first moved here, was pregnant again and asked me to help her. Sally was a big, calm woman with nice hips and utter sureness in her body, so I picked up my bruised heart, stuffed it back into my chest, and went back to work as a midwife.

 

Calamity

William MacIntosh was right. For three days it snows, a real blizzard, and the only time I step outside is to milk Moonlight. Then at noon today the sun comes out and, like the Count of Monte Cristo, I'm released from the dungeon, given back my life.

“Let's go sledding, dogs!” I dress hurriedly, pull on my boots, coat, scarf, and mittens. In the barn I find a sheet of old corrugated tin and struggle through two feet of powder up the back hill.

“Hi-ho, world!” I shout. “I'm raised from the dead!” I shout some more. “Hi-ho. Hi-ho!” There's an echo, and I'm just happy to hear a human voice, even if it is my own. “Hi-hooohhhh! Hi-hooohhhh!” Over and over again. The dogs leap up on me and then wallow in the deep white.

The first trip down the slope is awfully slow as I pack the run.

The next jaunt is better.

The third ride is really fun. I stand grinning at the top of the rise, panting from the exertion, my cheeks flushed, my nose running, my knit tam half off.

The fourth excursion is slick as slime.

On the fifth trip I rip my left calf open on the corner of the rusted metal.

“Damn!” I say to the dogs, not yet aware of what's happened, thinking at first that I've only torn my thick wool trousers. Then the blood comes and finally the pain.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” I curse some more, and the swearing seems to help.

“Oh, Emma, look what I've done!” Emma bounds over and licks my hand, then noses the blood, but I shoo her away. The barn is an eighth of a mile away, and beyond that is the house. Already I'm chilling and my damp clothes begin to freeze. If I could find a stick for a crutch it would help, but I'm out in a field without trees or bushes. I try first to move my knee, and though the pain brings tears to my eyes and I swear like a sailor, it still bends.

For the next hour I scoot, hobble, and limp toward the house. The dogs follow, and when I look back, they are licking at a trail of red in the pure white snow.

 

“ 'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house” . . . blood and tears. The gash on my leg is as long as my thumb, with a flap of skin a quarter inch deep. A tight pressure bandage, made from a dish towel, stops the bleeding, and I consider sewing myself back together with the suture from my birth kit. But my satchel is upstairs and anyway, I don't have the courage to stick a needle though my own flesh.

Since the sides of the wound come together, I pour a little soap and water into the tear, rinse it out, place a goldenseal compress across it to help prevent infection, and tie on a new bandage, hoping it will heal. Eventually I make myself a splint and hobble into the pantry to find some Bayer Aspirin. The bottle says to take two, but I take three, hoping it won't kill me.

 

It is never fun to spend Christmas alone, despite what I told Bitsy, even if you're a nonbeliever. Last year, the holiday passed in a fog. This year I have a tree, but with my injury I'm in no mood to celebrate.

I light the kerosene lamps, build up the fire, and, after I hobble out to feed the cow and chickens, lie back on the couch. The little pine in the corner looks so forlorn, all decked out like a streetwalker with nowhere to go. Emma and Sasha stare at me with big eyes. “Okay, guys, we can at least sing.” My mother's old hymnal is in on the bookshelf with her Bible, just within reach.

“Any requests for your favorite carol?” I ask Emma. Sasha raises his eyebrows, but neither makes a comment. “Okay, then, we'll sing them all.”

“O, come, all ye faithful,”
I begin,
“joyful and triumphant.”
I'm not very joyful; in fact, I almost choke on my tears, remembering times my family stood around the piano, my mother playing and my father singing in his bright baritone with his head thrown back.
“O, come ye, o, come ye to Beth-le-hem!”
He wasn't a gambler yet or much of a drinker. That came later.

Then there was the year with Lawrence when we strolled along the Lake Michigan docks on Christmas Eve caroling to anyone who would listen.
“Come and behold Him, born the king of angels . . .”

Even in Pittsburgh, in the good years, when Mrs. Kelly and Nora and I lived together and half our friends were Jewish or agnostics, we sang the old carols, celebrating not so much the birth of Jesus as our collective hope for light in a dark world.

“It's a pagan festival!” Ruben would laugh, but he knew all the words and sang louder than the lapsed Christians.

I swipe my tears with the back of my hand and determinedly sing on.
“The first Noel the angels did say was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay.”
I sing louder and louder, banishing the memories, one song after another banishing the ghosts of Christmas past.
“It came upon a midnight clear.”

The dogs howl with me, both of them now standing next to the sofa, their snouts pointing up like wolves.
“Whooooo! Whoooo!”
I wail with them, egging them on. Buster escapes up the stairs, his hair standing on end.
“O, come, all ye faithful!”

I'm singing so loud, I don't hear the sound of a car whining up the hill. I don't hear the footfalls in the snowy path to the house. I don't hear the first soft knock on the door.