The Postmistress (11 page)

She glanced up at the naked flagpole, then stared in the direction where Harry had disappeared, and flushed. She would go to the movies, she decided. She would not get her habitual chop at the café, she wasn’t hungry. She would not go back up the hill to her cottage.

INSIDE THE FISH HOUSE, nothing had changed much, either in the frequency or intensity of Maggie’s contractions. The clock beside her bed kept time like a supporter, the minutes passing as Maggie walked and slept. She had been right; she was in for a protracted labor. Will watched her as she breathed. When Will checked her again, the cervix was no wider. She fell again into a doze and Will went downstairs in search of coffee.

“How’s everything?” Jim Tom turned from the sink.

“Coming along,” said Will. “You want to come up?”

“I’d just as soon wait down here, thanks.” Jim Tom glanced at him. “How many babies have you caught there, Will?”

“Fifteen. No, sixteen,” Will answered abruptly.

Jim Tom nodded. “Then you ought to know how mean the ladies can get at the end.”

Will looked at him, quizzically.

“No?” Jim Tom smiled. “Well, maybe the Boston ladies hold their tongue.”

Above them, Maggie started to groan again. Will stopped and looked at his watch, timing the contraction. It lasted roughly the same amount of time as the others, though this one sounded lower than before, and maybe a bit more desperate to Will’s ear.

Will looked at Jim Tom. “Does that help her, do you think?”

“What?”

“Making that noise.”

Jim Tom stuck out his chin. “You bet,” he said.

Will nodded and made for the stairs. As he climbed, he could hear Maggie panting and he climbed a little faster. When he rounded the corner into the room, she was kneeling on the bed with her back to him, holding on to the headboard, her head down between her outstretched arms. He waited until she’d finished and then stepped in. She turned around and he saw that she was growing tired. Her eyes showed her weariness. And this worried him. “How are you holding up there, Maggie?” he said quietly. She nodded and exhaled. “Good,” she said.

He drew the fetoscope out of his bag to make an initial assessment of the baby’s heartbeat, and the sound, regular and steady, felt like a hand reached out to him from the other side, a greeting.

“He’s right there, waiting,” Will reassured Maggie. She nodded, blowing against the grip of the next contraction, and as Will watched her face, he had such a profound longing for Emma, for her quiet eyes on his, for her calm—yes, she was his calm—that he stood up and paced to the end of the room without thinking. He wanted to tell her again, firmly—he’d have found her.

When he’d first stumbled upon her at the hospital Christmas party two years ago, she had been staring out the grand windows draped for the season in holly and velvet with her back to the party. The doctors and nurses coming off duty entered with the cold air clinging to them, their bright voices bowling hard and tight into the cloudy good cheer of partygoers on their way out. She hadn’t moved for several minutes, and her absorption made all else in that room tiny. On a private dare, he wandered toward her. If she turned before he got there, he’d get a glance at her but not need to engage her. If she remained staring like that, her back to him, he’d offer her a drink.

But she stepped back from the window without turning, bumping into him. For an instant he felt her body light against him and smelled lemon in her hair. She leapt away from him and turned, her face gone pink. “I’m sorry!”

“I’m not.” He grinned and held out his hand. “Will Fitch.”

“Yes.” She took it, shook it, and quickly dropped it.

“Having fun?”

She looked directly at him then, with a slight smile on her lips. “No,” she answered. “Not at all.”

“Why not?”

“It’s Christmas,” she said.

“I see,” he said, noticing the tender line of her chin tipped as she watched him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to say next.

“We’re not for Christmas?” he groped.

She smiled more broadly now, though still a little shy. “No.”

“Why’s that? If you don’t mind my asking.”

She didn’t answer. He leaned against the wall beside her. After a minute or so he realized she wasn’t going to answer. He slid his gaze sideways. “I guess you do mind my asking.”

She looked straight at him. “I don’t know you.”

He straightened up quickly. “True enough. I’m sorry.”

She turned away from him and faced the room. “I’m not very good at small talk. Can I have a drink?”

Will was suddenly, painfully happy. “What’ll it be?”

“Bourbon,” she answered quickly, “and water.”

He nodded and made his way through the thick crowd toward the bar at the end of the room. Johnny Lambert was standing in the alcove there, surrounded by two or three other residents. He was telling a story and the circle around him had leaned in slightly to hear. There was a beat and then the group erupted, one of the men slapping Johnny on the back as if keeping time to his laughter, and the sound broke over the rest of the crowd carrying the delicious joke, the thick, hot gaiety gathering everyone in. For a moment the room seemed to collect on the wave of the laughter sent forth by Johnny, whose grace and talent was to treat the world like a ball he spun on one long finger.

Will had seen it the moment he’d arrived at Harvard eight years ago. Johnny’s grace was repeated in the easy tilt of the Boston boys as they sat taking notes, their notebooks pushed away from them, the slow scrawl of their pencils across the white pads like some long, lean jazz, some foreign inscrutable music playing just beyond Will’s own ear. Hunnewell. Cabot. Phipps. Sure, they worked. They even worked hard. But it was without heat or worry; the prizes given to them at the end of the year were casually taken, and lightly worn. Those boys were finer than the challenges Harvard tossed them. Unimpeachably fine.

Whereas he was Fitch. Sure, the name meant enough to get him into the right house in his sophomore year, enough to warrant the right amount of interest when he was introduced. But then, in the next breath—Franklin? At the end of Cape Cod? Do people live all the way out there? Thought the whole place shut up tight after Labor Day.

Ha, ha, he’d grin. Ha, ha. You’d be surprised. Three or four hundred of us are left there after you all flee. Is that right, the other would drawl, interest waning. Will Fitch from Franklin. He was a curio, an exotic. Not dismiss-able, but not someone to contend with either. All the years he was in Cambridge, he was Fitch—from Franklin. Which was nowhere to begin from.

The wash of Johnny’s joke had sped all the way out. Someone suggested another round, and Johnny nodded without looking up, his hand cupped around the darting flame of his lighter. Any minute he’d turn and see Will standing there alone and talking to no one, a fool in the middle of a party.

Suddenly what to do next had been simple. It was clear. Will turned back around and headed straight for the window, afraid she’d have disappeared. But he picked her out, still standing there. Waiting for him, he realized with a thrill.

“Hullo,” he said, coming to stand in front of her.

“No more drinks?”

“No,” he smiled. “There are. But there are too many people. Let’s go have a drink somewhere else.”

She looked up again at him. “I’m Emma Trask.” She offered him her hand.

“All right,” he said, taking it in his. His long fingers touched the inner place in her wrist where her pulse beat and he felt it race forward, as though he’d got hold of her heart. He tucked her hand under his arm and led her out of the party.

WILL TURNED around to Maggie. “Let’s check again,” he said softly. He piled up two pillows at the end of her bed, and placed her feet upon them. She opened her eyes and watched his face as he slipped his fingers inside her once more, feeling for the baby’s head. He smiled at her, relieved. The cervix was nearly completely dilated and the head was ready to pass into the bony pelvis.

“You’re closer,” he said, comfortingly, and reached to take her pulse.

As soon as his fingers found the spot on her wrist, he knew it was wrong. He held on to her for another full minute, counting the beats again to be sure. It was definitely accelerated. Her pulse had been quick before. Now it was racing. The earlier worry he had dismissed charged forward. There had been that smell. Her temperature was up. And now her pulse was rapid and irregular. He glanced at her, worried for the first time that these were signs pointing toward sepsis.

She closed her eyes again and groaned, low and dark as the throttle of a cow, the sound seeming to seep up from the ground beneath his feet.
Ohh
, the groaning note widened and grew around the room. He had attended sixteen births and even performed two cesarean sections, but those women had never been this loud. There had been nurses in the hospital and there had been ether and the babies had slid out like seals. He had never delivered a baby by himself before. And somehow, here in the tiny upstairs room of the fish house, it was as though this was his first birth, the first time he’d understood how far below the training women take you, down into the thick of it, into the dark blood stew where life begins.
Ohhh, ohhh, ohhh
—the groans battered him. A scream, the high relief of a scream—like a whistle or a piece of music—that he could manage, but this low deep repetition took him down far underground. Her eyes were shut tight as if she were trying to remember something or make her way forward somewhere, while her mouth kept opening on the crest of the contraction, bellowing the pain.

Dimly, through the floorboards, Will heard the older children returning home; hearing them, Maggie smiled weakly.

“They ought to go back with their grandmother,” Will said more harshly than he meant.

“They don’t sleep if they can’t sleep in their beds,” she murmured.

“But—”

“They’ve heard it before,” she sighed.

The next groan started forward again, thick and deep. Will stood up from the bed abruptly. There ought to be more light in the room. In the hospital, scenes like this were reassuringly lit, there was never a question of not knowing where you’d put your things, where you might need to go to get hot water or towels. Light counteracted the horror Maggie was in the grip of, light. He strode over to the door and flicked the switch and the white ceramic bowl burst into brightness above his head, pushing away the desperation he was feeling. It was a simple bedroom with a dresser and three windows, a rocking chair and a round hooked rug beside the bedstead.

Downstairs were the other children, and Will thought of Lowenstein, who had brought those others into the world, and wished he were here to consult with, a pair of experienced hands, another set of diagnostic eyes. To have somebody in the room other than this woman groaning. This woman—he forced himself to look and smile as she rolled her head against the pillow and closed her eyes—this woman who was Maggie, who used to be Maggie in his classroom. Maggie on the waterfront, her long legs tangling in the riggings of her father’s boat above his head. Maggie who stared straight into his eyes when he examined her, his inquiring fingers sliding into her to see if all was in place, not like most who shut their eyes or looked up into the ceiling.

The old tenacious dread slid out into the shallows. It had always gone wrong for the Fitches. Why had he thought it could be any different? Why had he thought he could begin again in the same town, with the same name as his father’s? He nearly laughed aloud, the bubble of fear rising in his chest as he listened to Maggie now. This deep dark grunting dread, this was what held on. He had married Emma. He had come back to town a doctor. He had thought he could plan a future and kiss his wife like anyone else. But the truth was, the old dark feeling swam just there. It would never go away. And here was proof.

Suddenly with terrific energy, Maggie bolted up and turned her back around, looked at Will wildly but didn’t seem to see him, kneeling on the bed with her hands on the wall behind the headboard. She turned away from him and then back, groaning,
stop stop stop
, the word panting out as regular as a machine.
Stop stop stop stop
—her voice rose and then she arched her back away from the pain driving around and around inside her, and when it was over she groaned wordless, and slumped against the board. Will watched her, nervous. It was as though he’d seen a rag doll shaken in the mouth of a dog, her body flung this way and that, and then flung away, the doll left to lie flat and limp, pale and sweating.

The eerie sound of a child humming to itself came up from down below. It was a tuneless little sound and it came so purely up through the floorboards that Will realized the walls kept nothing out, that the children down below had heard their mother, that he and she might just as well be behind a curtain in the middle of a crowded public ward.

“Maggie?” he whispered, licking his lips.

She might have fallen suddenly asleep, though she lay pale and sweating with her eyes closed. The child’s tune snaked around in the air with no apparent destination or pattern. Will sat and listened, his own brain stuck and tired, the light slowly departing from the attic, leaving the old white sails to glow where they had been piled.
Oh
, sang the child
, oh, oh, oh that opportunity rag
. Will tried to remember the children’s names and ages. Who was the singer down there, and where were the rest?
Oh,
hummed the child again, his voice dipping lower. Maggie’s hand fell open on the bed. Had she passed out, or was she only asleep? She was asleep, Will saw now, deep asleep, her mouth parted a little and a flush spread upon her cheeks. The series of waves that she had been borne upon, crashing once and once again and then once more, had receded and left her to sleep. Will rolled his wrist over to check the time. Four minutes had past. The little boy—it must be a boy, Will had decided, the tone was so pure—had moved toward the front of the house and the voice now came from there, sliding backward and up through the floorboards at his feet. Maggie’s eyelids fluttered slightly. Did she hear the one child, he wondered, calling to the other? For that is how it seemed, this one sweet little bird down below humming in the middle of this terrible scene, the mother nothing but a string held in the fierce tiny grips of the unborn and the child already here and pulled on, mercilessly. He stood and pulled a washcloth out of the basin, wringing it damp.