The Reluctant Midwife (19 page)

I take another sip of spearmint tea, made from Patience's dried herbs, and stare out the kitchen window. There's a wind coming in from the north and it's cold. The sky is pale blue and the trees are all bare, all except the spruce on the mountain.

The experience at the Bishop brothers' farm yesterday intrigues me, and I can't help thinking about how functional Dr. Blum seemed, almost like one of the guys. I must remember to keep on challenging him, to not let him get away with being an invalid. Like a child, he needs new activities to build up his skills. That's why I asked Daniel for a pocketknife.

Now, Dr. Blum sits in the rocker near the Hesters' wood heater stove, whittling a stick. There's a pile of shavings in a basket at his feet that I plan to keep for starting fires. At Walter Reed they called it “occupational therapy,” and it seemed to do the disabled vets good.

The sound of a motor whining down Salt Lick Road pulls me out of my reverie and a truck bumps across the bridge. It's Mr. Maddock, and all I can think is it must be some emergency. He starts out the minute I open the door. “Ma'am,” he blurts out. “Ma'am, I wonder if I could trouble you . . .”

“Come in. Come in. Please.” The frigid air explodes through the doorway and I watch as he pulls off his black hat, then steps out of his work boots. I have never seen him without his hat before, and his hair is thick and peppered gray. “Can I offer you some tea?”

The farmer stares at Blum. “No. No, thanks. Is he okay with that knife?”

I smile. “Yes. He's not cut himself once or done anything inappropriate. Dr. Blum used to be a surgeon, you know, and was handy with scalpels.” I say this last part with a smile, but Maddock doesn't get the humor. “How can I help you?”

“It's Mrs. Maddock. She's in the family way . . . and I'm worried.” Here he looks down at his wool socks, green with brown toes, probably knitted by his disabled wife. Patience knits too, but I've never learned.

I picture his wife, a polio victim of about fifty, who's been paralyzed from the waist down since she was in her early thirties. “Are you sure? Some women miss their monthlies when they're close to the change.” I can see he's embarrassed.

“Yes, Sarah thought the same thing, but yesterday we both felt it move. I wonder if you could make a home visit. Mr. Stenger at the pharmacy said you'd be the one, since the midwife had to take to bed.”

“How old is your wife?”

“Just forty-seven.”

“Certainly, I'll come. Do you want me right now?”

“If you're not too busy . . . I could drive you and bring you back.”

“I need to get a coat and hat, and I guess I have to bring Dr. Blum. Dr. Hester is away.”

“You have to bring the doctor?”

“Yes, I can't leave him here alone,” I explain. “There's no one to watch him. Mrs. Hester must stay upstairs resting.”

“Well, I guess . . .” Maddock hedges and I remember how
protective he is of his wife. He steps back in his boots, but he stops and turns before he goes outside.

“I know you aren't a fortune-teller, Miss Myers. You can't predict the future, but I can't lose Sarah. Childbirth can be hard on an older woman, and we both know there can be trouble with the baby. Just tell us what you think. That's all we want.”

The man looks at me for a long time, and I can't be sure, but I think there are tears in his watery blue eyes.

“Sarah,” Maddock yells at the door of the two-story white clapboard farmhouse on Wild Rose Road. “Are you in the bedroom? I'm bringing Miss Myers in to see you. Dr. Blum is here too.” He stands blocking Isaac, as if the sight of him would cause his wife to faint.

In truth my charge has become quite handsome. He stands tall and straight, has good teeth, and though his hair is receding, it's dark and curly. He has a strong jaw and beautiful eyes, or they used to be, before the light went out in them.

“Yes, I'm in here, honey, lying down.”

We enter a cool, dark interior, furnished with a leather settee and matching chairs, a fringed blue lamp, the kind David and I had in our little house in Brattleboro, and a flowered blue carpet.

Mr. Maddock indicates the closed door of a downstairs bedroom. “That way,” he instructs me. “Can the doctor drink sarsaparilla? I have some in the fridge.”

“Sure, just set the bottle in front of him to give him the idea. And can you take off his boots?” I lay my hat and wool coat on
the sofa and tap on the door. “Sarah? It's Nurse Becky. How are you doing?”

“Oh, come on in. I'm fine. Just a little tired. Tired of doing nothing. You know how Mr. Maddock is! He'd have me confined for the whole pregnancy, if he could.” Sarah laughs and I can't help myself, I laugh too. She's a pale, soft, thin woman with gold and silver hair pinned back on the sides, and she wears a hand-knit blue cardigan with darker blue flowers embroidered on the front.

“So, are you okay? Your husband seems awfully worried.”

“Kiddo, I'm ecstatic. When I became paralyzed and lost my first baby, we never tried to have another one, but we weren't trying not too, either. I assumed the high fevers during my illness had just made me sterile.”

“Another baby? You've given birth before?”

“Yes, years ago. We don't talk about it.”

“Was it stillborn or a miscarriage?”

“No, the baby was fine, but I was terribly ill. I had polio and the paralysis was moving up toward my chest. If it got to my diaphragm I would stop breathing. The doctors thought I was certain to die, so they talked Mr. Maddock into letting them do an emergency cesarean section and he gave our little girl to my cousin who'd never been able to get pregnant.”

She recites all this without emotion, but when she ends I see the side of her mouth twitch one time, an expression that tells me she still feels the pain.

“No one thought I would live, and then when I slowly recovered over the next twelve months, I couldn't ask for the baby back, could I? What's even sadder is that both my cousin and the little girl passed a few years later during the Spanish flu epidemic.”

I lay my medical bag on the carpeted floor. “May I?” I say, indicating the bed.

“Sure.” Mrs. Maddock smoothes the covers so I can sit down
next to her. “So here we are with another chance,” she goes on. “My husband's terrified, won't let me lift a finger, but I think it's good for women to be active during their pregnancies, don't you?” We both look down at her skinny withered legs, white against the white coverlet. She shrugs and covers them with a lap robe.

“Well, as active as I can be anyway. It's not like I can go out and throw hay to the cows.” Here she gives me a pleasant smile, showing that she has a sly sense of humor. She is a sensitive, intelligent woman, someone I would like for a friend, if I had time for friendship.

“No, I agree. Unless you're bleeding or having pain, you should be up moving about, doing your normal activities. How far along are you?”

“I don't know. I haven't had a monthly since July. I was always regular before and I thought I was having hot flashes, though, looking back, it was a horrible summer, maybe I was just hot.”

“Let me examine you. If you really are four or five months' pregnant you should be showing by now. You think you felt the baby move yesterday?”

The pale woman smiles. “Yes. Yes. We both felt it.” She pulls up her housedress and shows me her belly, which is rounded, but not the way it should be. I press down gently around her belly button. No hard, round ball of uterine muscle. I palpate lower.
Still no firm ball
.

“What are you feeling for?”

“It's called the fundus, the top of the uterus. Where did you feel the baby move?”

She points to an area just above the umbilicus and to the left.
Too high
.

“Sarah, I don't think you conceived this summer. I don't know how to say this but Mr. Maddock wanted my honest opinion. I don't think you felt movement way up there. Your uterus is still
very small. You're either not pregnant or you're very early.” I stop to let my words sink in and am surprised to see tears well up in the woman's green eyes. The room darkens, though there's no change in the light, and the smile that had illuminated Sarah's face fades.

“So I'm not with child?” She says it like this, in the old-fashioned way.

“Well, I'm not positive, but I'd say no, unless you just very recently conceived. Any morning sickness or breast tenderness?”

Mrs. Maddock shakes her head no.

“You can go to Torrington and get the A-to-Z test where they inject a baby mouse with your urine if you really want to be sure.”

“I don't think so. . . . Will you tell Mr. Maddock? He will be relieved. He was so worried that having a baby would hurt me.” I stare at the woman, who wipes her moist eyes and turns toward the window.

“I'm sorry,” I murmur and then leave the room.

At the kitchen table I find the two men silently drinking sarsaparilla. “Mr. Maddock,” I begin abruptly, wanting to get it over with. “I can't be sure, but I don't think your wife is pregnant. At least, if she is, she's not far along. She hasn't been sick or had any breast soreness, and her womb is still small.” The men look up, Blum paying special attention and Mr. Maddock looking confused.

“But we both felt it move!”

“I know. I know. You felt something, maybe a gas bubble, but the baby couldn't have been as high as where Sarah showed me.”

The man twists his lips, trying to keep from crying, then clears his throat. “Is Sarah okay? She would be a good mother. I was just so worried about the pregnancy being dangerous for her.”

“She's disappointed. You'd better go to her. We'll find our way home. It's only a mile.”

It's a silent walk down Wild Rose Road and around Salt Lick,
but then with Blum it always is. Tiny hard raindrops pelt our faces, and at the Hope River the smoke of three campfires rises in the mist. I blow on my hands because I forgot my mittens and Dr. Blum gallantly gives me his.

This morning when I take Patience her breakfast she looks rather blue. I'm sure it must be torture for an energetic person like her to lie in bed all day, but sometimes she gets under my skin. At nine
A.M.
she's still wearing her flannel nightgown and her hair is a mess.

“About time to get dressed, isn't it?”

“What's the point, Becky? I won't be going anywhere. Why bother? I'll just stay in my nightclothes.”

“You think that will make you feel better?”

She has copies of the
Socialist Worker
all over the bed. It's become her main interest, cutting out the reports about the labor unrest, stikes here, battles there. Recently she told me about a textile workers' strike in Rhode Island, the largest one ever. There were 420,000 men and women on the streets.

“No, it won't make me feel better.”

“So what will it be, then, the red frock or blue?” I indicate two housedresses hanging on pegs next to the window.

“Red, the blood won't show,” she answers bitterly.

“Speaking of dresses, I have to find one. I've been invited to a dance.” My news has the desired effect.

“A date?” Patience pushes up in bed so suddenly, I worry she'll start bleeding again. “Why didn't you tell me? With who?”

“Calm yourself. It isn't
a real date
. Captain Wolfe at the CCC
camp asked me to go with him to a benefit for Arthurdale Community. You know, Eleanor Roosevelt's pet project, the one that was in the newspaper. All the other men have wives, and when he said the First Lady would be there, I couldn't say no. It's New Year's Eve, a long time from now. Do you have anything I could wear? Maybe I should have refused.”

“Are you kidding? You
have
to go. Think of it, the
president's wife
right here in West Virginia! And she's a real liberal crusader too! Leave it to me. I'll come up with something.”

Later in the afternoon, I take a bucket of warm water upstairs and wash my friend's hair, which cheers her considerably. “Any bleeding?”

“Not today.”

“Is the baby still moving?” Here she smiles, a burst of sunlight.

“Of course. As old Mrs. Potts would say, ‘The infant is right lively.' I miss Mrs. Potts. Are you going to be my midwife, Becky? I know you love childbirth!”

Now it's my turn to smile. “I guess . . . I visited Sarah Maddock yesterday. She thought she was pregnant. Hadn't had a menstrual period for five months, but I don't think she is.”

“Was she sad?”

“Yes, I think she was. Mr. Maddock seemed sad too, though he might have been relieved. He was so worried about his wife's health. They both knew at forty-seven she had a chance of having a baby with problems. I told them they could go to the hospital in Torrington and have a test to be sure, but I doubt they will. The sad thing is, they thought they'd already felt movement, and I really think Sarah would like to be a mother. She'd had a baby before, did you know?”

“I did. She told me one day when we were having tea, but I've seen that before, women thinking they felt the baby when there was no baby. Probably a gas bubble.”

“That's what I said. Is there something I should have done differently? I hated to disappointment them. What if I'm wrong?”

There's a pause, long enough to hear a red-tailed hawk in the distance, and Patience pushes out a sigh. “I don't think there was anything else you could do. She's pregnant or she's not, and either way, I think she'll be okay. We are all stronger than we think.”